Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.
Topic
mathematics
/mathematics-quotes-and-sayings
Topic Summary
About the mathematics quote collection
The mathematics page groups 513 quotes under one canonical topic hub so readers and answer engines can cite a stable source instead of fragmented search results.
Topic Feed
Quotes filed under mathematics
a fresh mind adds a better mathematic ability #Bweqy
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty__ beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus.
Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.""Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,Their indices bedecked from one to n,Commingled in an endless Markov chain!Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,And every vector dreams of matrices.Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:It whispers of a more ergodic zone.In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach spaceLet superscripts and subscripts go their ways.Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,We shall encounter, counting, face to face.I'll grant thee random access to my heart,Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,And in bound partition never part.For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,A root or two, a torus and a node:The inverse of my verse, a null domain.Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!The product of our scalars is defined!Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mindCuts capers like a happy haversine.I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.Bernoulli would have been content to die,Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Patience is my virtue, but only in Math, Daddy,_ - Ashley
We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only once, since it is almost wholly a written language.
Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.
To return to the general analysis of the Rosicrucian outlook. Magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mathematics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world. One cannot leave out the angels in this world view, however much it may have been advancing towards the scientific revolution. The religious outlook is bound up with the idea that penetration has been made into higher angelic spheres in which all religions were seen as one; and it is the angels who are believed to illuminate man's intellectual activities.In the earlier Renaissance, the magi had been careful to use only the forms of magic operating in the elemental or celestial spheres, using talismans and various rituals to draw down favourable influences from the stars. The magic of a bold operator like Dee, aims beyond the stars, aims at doing the supercelestial mathematical magic, the angel-conjuring magic. Dee firmly believed that he had gained contact with good angels from whom he learned advancement in knowledge. This sense of close contact with angels or spiritual beings is the hallmark of the Rosicrucian. It is this which infuses his technology, however practical and successful and entirely rational in its new understanding of mathematical techniques, with an unearthly air, and makes him suspect as possibly in contact, not with angels, but with devils.
Who rebels with mathematics?
The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.
I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.
Mathematics is Open Source.
Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.
Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.
Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it need only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce to possessions, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as the space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness, the life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud and cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence.
You__e probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone__ better at math than I am, but it__ okay, I__ fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things__uitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few.
The mathematician__ patterns, like the painter__ or the poet__ must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.