#mathematics

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators. ↗

— Ann Patchett

#dating

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake. ↗

— Roman Payne

#artistic #creativity #equations #gifts #ideas

...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart. ↗

— Yoko Ogawa

#imagination

One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#eternity #future #mathematics #physics #politics

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#mathematics

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline. ↗

— Alain Badiou

#communism #euclid #geometry #mao #maoism

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#science #science

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley. ↗

— Yōko Ogawa

#mathematics #ogawa #problem-solving #professor #mathematics

JOY goes against the foundations of mathematics: it multiplies when we divide. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#mathematics

Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience. ↗

— Pam Brown

#mathematics