Mathematics

"Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation. In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means."

"Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere."

"In doing mathematics, I express something personal. It is a source of joy to know that, despite this personal aspect, the fruit of my work can be of interest to other mathematicians."

"It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances."

"Now comes the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen entangled state. Now I see faces, people saying, "Oh..?" Don't worry! When you go to the concert, you don't need to be able to read the music, to enjoy the music. ...So here... [are] equations. It's a pleasure for my colleague physicists. If you can't read the equation, listen to me. I'm not going to sing, but... listen to the words... the words are... a way of describing the equations, and you don't need to know the mathematics..."

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics."

"Confused is of course the best state a mathematician can be in; the struggle out of that state is the primary drive for progress."

"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one."

"Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics. Once that germ of rationality and order exists to turn a chaos into a cosmos, then so does mathematics. There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers."

"We say that the string is 'random' if there is no other representation of the string which is shorter than itself. But we will say that it is 'non-random' if there does exist such an abbreviated representation. ...In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. ...It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. ...When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. ...In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality..."

"Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer. ...The PC revolution has made science more visual and more immediate ...by creating films of imaginary experiences of mathematical worlds. ...Words are no longer enough."

"Something more than impeccable logic is required in mathematics. An expert logician will not necessarily be a passable mathematician for all his skill in logic, any more than a scholarly prosodist will be a respectable poet for all his mastery of meter."

"A narrative of the decisive epochs in the development of mathematics was wanted. ...Numerous professionals... know from hard experience what mathematical invention means. ...Whoever has himself attempted to advance mathematics is inclined to be more skeptical than the average spectator toward any alleged anticipation of notable progress. ...often what looks like an anticipation ...was not even aimed in the right direction. ...when at length progress started; it proceeded along lines totally different from those which, in retrospect, it 'should' have followed."

"Nearly always it is the recondite and complicated which is elaborated first; and it is only when some relatively unsophisticated mind attacks a problem that its deep simplicity is revealed."

"Ruth felt that math was like sex—get all you can, but best not done in public."

"“It’s magic,” the chief cook concluded, in awe. “No, not magic,” the ship’s doctor replied. “It’s much more. It’s mathematics.”"

"Maths is really hard to define. ...Except I like to define maths as this{{center|1=\frac{\pi}{4} = 1 - \frac{1}{3} + \frac{1}{5} - \frac{1}{7} + \frac{1}{9} - \frac{1}{11}\cdots}}This formula which links π to the odd numbers... It's true. It's always been there. It's absolutely wonderful. It connects odd numbers to the ratio of a circle, and... if you don't like that, then you have no mathematical soul."

"The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason."

"Over time you will get the wrong answer more times than you get the right answer. That’s not a problem! You’ve learnt what doesn’t work, just try again."

"I would myself say that the purely imaginary objects are the only realities, the ὂντως ὂντα [truest things], in regard to which the corresponding physical objects are as the shadows in the cave; and it is only by means of them that we are able to deny the existence of a corresponding physical object; and if there is no conception of straightness, then it is meaningless to deny the conception of a perfectly straight line."

"You don’t need anybody’s permission to be a great mathematician!"

"This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem."

"Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art are constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic."

"There is probably no other science which presents such different appearances to one who cultivates and one who does not, as mathematics. To [the non-mathematician] it is ancient, venerable, and complete; a body of dry, irrefutable, unambiguous reasoning. To the mathematician, on the other hand, his science is yet in the purple of bloom of vigorous youth, everywhere stretching out after the "attainable but unattained," and full of the excitement of nascent thoughts; its logic is beset with ambiguities, and its analytic processes, like Bunyan's road, have a quagmire on one side and a deep ditch on the other, and branch off into innumerable by-paths that end in a wilderness."

"Mathematics is the study of anything that obeys the rules of logic, using the rules of logic."

"The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. In Greek, mathematics simply meant learning, and we have adapted this... to define the term as "learning to decide." Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa."

"[F]inding direct measurement so often impossible, we are compelled to devise means of doing it indirectly. Hence arose Mathematics."

"To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples..."

"The study of mathematics is the indispensable basis for all intellectual and spiritual progress."

"The progress of mathematics has been most erratic, and... intuition has played a predominant rôle in it. ...It was the function of intuition to create new forms; it was the acknowledged right of logic to accept or reject these new forms, in whose birth it had no part. ...the children had to live, so while waiting for logic to sanctify their existence, they throve and multiplied."

"Between the philosopher's attitude towards the issue of reality and that of the mathematician there is this essential difference: for the philosopher the issue is paramount; the mathematician's love for reality is purely platonic."

"The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. ...The conic sections, invented in an attempt to solve the problem of doubling the altar of an oracle, ended by becoming the orbits followed by the planets... The imaginary magnitudes invented by Cardan and Bombelli describe... the characteristic features of alternating currents. The absolute differential calculus, which originated as a fantasy of Reimann, became the mathematical model for the theory of Relativity. And the matrices which were a complete abstraction in the days of Cayley and Sylvester appear admirably adapted to the... quantum of the atom."

"The thing with mathematics is we keep thinking about how things work. And once you figure it out, you then see other things, connections and so on. And two weeks later it's so obvious that you could kick yourself for not having thought of it sooner. The high doesn't last! So you have to enjoy it as long as it does last."

"Underpinning everything... are the laws of physics. These remarkably ingenious laws are able to permit matter to self-organize to the point where consciousness emerges in the cosmos—mind from matter—and the most striking product of the human mind is mathematics. This is the baffling thing. Mathematics is... produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs. ...at the opposite end of spectrum of complexity from the human brain. ...a product of the most complex system we know in nature, the human brain, finds a consonance with the underlying, simplest and most fundamental level, the basic building blocks that make up the world."

"It suggests to me that consciousness and our ability to do mathematics are no mere accident, no trivial detail, no insignificant by-product of evolution that is piggy-backing on some other mundane property. It points to what I like to call the cosmic connection, the existence of a really deep relationship between minds that can do mathematics and the underlying laws of nature that produce them. We have a closed system of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can encode... the very laws of physics that gave rise to it."

"Physicists have been drawn to elegant mathematical relationships that bind the subject together with economy and style, melding disparate qualities in subtle and harmonious ways. But this is to import a new factor into the argument—questions of aesthetics and taste. We are then on shaky ground indeed. It may be that M theory looks beautiful to its creators, but ugly to N theorists, who think that their theory is the most elegant. But then the O theorists disagree with both groups..."

"Mathematics, in an earlier view, is the science of space and quantity; in a later view, it is the science of pattern and deductive structure. Since the Greeks, mathematics is also the science of the infinite."

"Our ignorance of this beautiful subject -- a tree of ideas with ancient roots and modern fruit -- is profound and beset with fear, superstition, and misinformation."

"A marveilous newtrality have these things mathematicall and also a strange participation between things supernaturall, imortall, intellectuall, simple and indivisible, and things naturall, mortall, sensible, compounded and divisible."

"The nature of mathematical demonstration is totally different from all other, and the difference consists in this—that, instead of showing the contrary of the proposition asserted to be only improbable, it proves it at once to be absurd and impossible. This is done by showing that the contrary of the proposition which is asserted is in direct contradiction to some extremely evident fact, of the truth of which our eyes and hands convince us."

"We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it can see better with one eye than with two."

"With a view to summon myself to the search for a science of mathematics in general, I asked myself... what precisely was the meaning of this word mathematics, and why arithmetic and geometry only, and not also astronomy, music, optics, mechanics, and so many other sciences, should be considered as forming a part of it; for it is not enough here to know the etymology of the word. In reality the word mathematics meaning nothing but science, those which I have just named have as much right as geometry to be called mathematics; and nevertheless there is no one, however little instructed, who cannot distinguish at once what belongs to mathematics... from what belongs to the other sciences. But... all the sciences which have for their end investigations concerning order and measure, are related to mathematics, it being of small importance whether this measure be sought in numbers, forms, stars, sounds, or any other object; that, accordingly, there ought to exist a general science which should explain all that can be known about order and measure, considered independently of any application to a particular subject, and that, indeed, this science has its own proper name, consecrated by long usage, to wit, mathematics..."

"Mathematics in itself, as I say, is independent of experience. It begins with the free choice of symbols, to which are freely assigned properties, and it then proceeds to deduce the necessary rational implications of those properties."

"It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better."

"Recreational mathematics is a splendid hobby which young and old can equally enjoy. The popularity of Sudoku shows that an aptitude for recreational mathematics is widespread in the population. From Sudoku it is easy to ascend to mathematical pursuits that offer more scope for imagination and originality."

"We tend to think of maths as being an 'exact' discipline, where answers are right or wrong. And it's true that there is a huge part of maths that is about exactness. But in everyday life, numerical answers are sometimes just the start of the debate. If we are trained to believe that every numerical question has a definite, 'right' answer then we miss the fact that numbers in the real world are a lot fuzzier than pure maths might suggest."

"I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission."

"Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself."

"“There’s more to life than mathematics,” Joan said. “But not much more.”"

"Rather like the way the Hubble Space Telescope has made a significant contribution to astronomy in enabling astronomers to discover hidden structures and properties of our distant universe, dynamic geometry software has allowed new worlds to become viewable and tangible in mathematics and particularly in geometry."