#thematic

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics. ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#clumsy #consider #elegance #essential #further

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations. ↗

— Stephen Wolfram

#been #describe #dominated #equations #exact

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. ↗

— Núria Añó

#ageing #aging #aging-gracefully #economy #getting-older

Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #art

The only problem i had with literature that I simply couldn't figure out was that the correct answer was the first thing that comes to your mind after reading the question, the most obvious one. I can only blame math for that. ↗

— Blin Varfi

#exams #highschool #humor #irony #literature

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders. ↗

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

#mathematicians #other #shoulders #stand

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#establishment #gaede #mathematical-physics #mathematicians #mathematics

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign. ↗

— Mark Z. Danielewski

#equilibrium #harmony #mathematics #metaphysics #physics

Luck is the grand equalizer. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#equality

People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy. ↗

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

#mathematics #truth #equality