Science Quotes - Page 35

• An announcement of [Christopher] Zeeman's lecture at Northwestern University in the spring of 1977 contains a quote describing catastrophe theory as the most important development in mathematics since the invention of calculus 300 years ago.

  Stephen Smale

  Spring, Years, Important

  Stephen Smale, Roderick Wong (2000). “The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale”, p.814, World Scientific

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• I love mathematics not only because it is applicable to technology but also because it is beautiful.

  Rozsa Peter

  Beautiful, Technology, Mathematics

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• It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Law, Interesting, Intellectual

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• It is perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called 'exact sciences' which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposite to one another.

  Vasco Ronchi

  Law, Opposites, Iron

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• It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in order to improve such an organ as the eye at all, it must be improved in ten different ways at once. And the improbability of any complex organ being produced and brought to perfection in any such way is an improbability of the same kind and degree as that of producing a poem or a mathematical demonstration by throwing letters at random on a table.

  Joseph Murray

  Eye, Order, Perfection

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• Many who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

  Sofia Kovalevskaya

  Opportunity, Reality, Knowing

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• Mathematics education is much more complicated than you expected, even though you expected it to be more complicated than you expected.

  Edward G. Begle

  Education, Math, Complicated

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• Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him ; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to rest had no tendency to prove them. But he had been endeavouring to give a more active and positive help than this to the cause of what he deemed pure religion.

  Mary Everest Boole

  Husband, Mean, Giving

  "Mary Everest Boole, Collected Works" by Mary Everest Boole, edited by ‎Eleanor Meredith Cobham, (p. 40), 1931.

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• Only dead mathematics can be taught where the attitude of competition prevails: living mathematics must always be a communal possession.

  Mary Everest Boole

  Attitude, Teaching, Competition

  Mary Everest Boole (1931). “...Collected Works...”

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• Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly-yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100.

  Robert Kanigel

  Nature, Years, Ramanujan

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• Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.

  Giuseppe Peano

  Philosophy, Foundation, Use

  "The Principles of Arithmetic, presented by a new method". Book by Giuseppe Peano, 1889.

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• The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Teacher, Moving, Math

  "The Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton". Book by Robert Perceval Graves, Volume 3, p. 219, 1889.

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• The usefulness of mathematics in furthering the sciences is commonly acknowledged: but outside the ranks of the experts there is little inquiry into its nature and purpose as a deliberate human activity. Doubtless this is due to the inevitable drawback that mathematical study is saturated with technicalities from beginning to end.

  Herbert Turnbull

  Experts, Purpose, Inquiry

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• There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

  Nikolai Lobachevsky

  Real, Math, World

  "The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane". Book by George Edward Martin, 1975.

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• What binds us to space-time is our rest mass, which prevents us from flying at the speed of light, when time stops and space loses meaning. In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live "nowhere" and "nowhen"; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things.

  IU?. I. Manin

  Light, Space, Flying

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• When the difficulty of a problem lies only in finding out what follows from certain fixed premises, mathematical methods furnish invaluable wings for flying over intermediate obstructions.

  Arthur M. Wellington

  Lying, Wings, Problem

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• While, on the one hand, the end of scientific investigation is the discovery of laws, on the other, science will have reached its highest goal when it shall have reduced ultimate laws to one or two, the necessity of which lies outside the sphere of our cognition. These ultimate laws-in the domain of physical science at least-will be the dynamical laws of the relations of matter to number, space, and time. The ultimate data will be number, matter, space, and time themselves. When these relations shall be known, all physical phenomena will be a branch of pure mathematics.

  William Mitchinson Hicks

  Lying, Discovery, Hands

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• [Before the time of Benjamin Peirce it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research] was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood alone-a mountain peak whose absolute height might be hard to measure, but which towered above all the surrounding country.

  Julian Coolidge

  Country, Mountain Peaks, Research

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• Knowledge is the death of research.

  Walther Nernst

  Knowledge, Research, Knows

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• An intelligent patient, private or otherwise, to whom you have taken the trouble to explain the nature of the investigation, makes the best laboratory animal.

  Fuller Albright

  Taken, Animal, Intelligent

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• But the World being once fram'd, and the course of Nature establish'd, the Naturalist, (except in some few cases, where God, or Incorporeal Agents interpose), has recourse to the first Cause but for its general and ordinary Support and Influence, whereby it preserves Matter and Motion from Annihilation or Desition; and in explicating particular phenomena, considers onely the Size, Shape, Motion, (or want of it) Texture, and the resulting Qualities and Attributes of the small particles of Matter.

  Robert Boyle

  Support, Quality, Firsts

  Robert Boyle, John James MacIntosh (2005). “Boyle on Atheism”, p.326, University of Toronto Press

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• Doctors have been exposed-you always will be exposed-to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world's most bitter agonies-the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Pain, Doctors, Agony

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• How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals.

  Clifford Truesdell

  Years, Swim, Trying

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• I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.

  William Lawrence Bragg

  Expression, Play, Important

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• I sometimes think about the tower at Pisa as the first particle accelerator, a (nearly) vertical linear accelerator that Galileo used in his studies.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Thinking, Towers, Research

  Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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