#mathematics

I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics. ↗

— John Pople

#branches #changed #could #follow #had

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#facts #learning #life #life-lessons #mathematics

The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might glimpse some kind of secret underlying truth, some sort of message from the gods. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #art

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality. ↗

— Hermann Weyl

#long #mathematics #reality #still #words

I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids. ↗

— Baruch Spinoza

#philosophy #anger

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#courage

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#mathematics #education

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway. ↗

— Mark Twain

#humor #mathematics #school #education

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. ↗

— James Gleick

#chaos-theory #life #mathematics #paradigm #paradigm-shift

So a) To what extent might human relationship be expressed in mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these signs are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? ↗

— Julian Barnes

#mathematics #relationship #relationship