mathematics

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

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.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.

We must always emphasize research and development of science and mathematics, and I can think of no better way to achieve this than through our future in space.

The __use_ 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.

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.

One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.

My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn__ accept?

The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

[Benjamin Peirce's] lectures were not easy to follow. They were never carefully prepared. The work with which he rapidly covered the blackboard was very illegible, marred with frequent erasures, and not infrequent mistakes (he worked too fast for accuracy). He was always ready to digress from the straight path and explore some sidetrack that had suddenly attracted his attention, but which was likely to have led nowhere when the college bell announced the close of the hour and we filed out, leaving him abstractedly staring at his work, still with chalk and eraser in his hands, entirely oblivious of his departing class.

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

Therefor I doubt not but, if it had been a thing contrary to any man__ right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, __hat the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square,_ that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

Anything you try to quantify can be divided into any number of "anythings," or become the thing - the unit - itself. And what is any number, itself, but just another unit of measurement? What is a 'six' but two 'threes', or three 'twos'...half a 'twelve', or just six 'ones' - which are what? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)