Math Education Quotes

This is apparently a little promotional ¶ where we're supposed to explain "how and why we came to" the subject of our GD series book (the stuff in quotations is the editor's words). The overall idea is to humanize the series and make the books and their subjects seem warmer and more accessible. So that people will be more apt to buy the books. I'm pretty sure this is how it works. The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that, if the books are any good at all, then the writers' interest and investment in their subjects will be so resoundingly obvious in the texts themselves that these little pseudo-intimate Why I Cared Enough About Transfinite Math and Where It Came From to Spend a Year Writing a Book About It blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the books aren't any good, it's hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno's Dichotomy and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness - how any such stuff will help. The logic of this objection seems airtight to me. In fact, the only way the objection doesn't apply is if these ¶s are really nothing more than disguised ad copy, in which case I don't see why anyone reading them should ~ David Foster Wallace

The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing. ~ Leopold Kronecker

Applied war is where the money's at. I don't mean that figuratively. Defense is 140% of the UVE budget. Offense is twice that. This is possible because there is no budget for math education. ~ Zach Weinersmith

Where there is matter, there is geometry. ~ Johannes Kepler

Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then ... do something. Don't just stand there, make it happen. ~ Lee Iacocca

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency. ~ Rene Descartes

Geometry is the science of correct reasoning on incorrect figures. ~ George Polya

Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? Where does the proof use the hypothesis? ~ Paul Halmos

I have been involved with science and math education my whole life. My hope is to continue to promote the love of these beautiful disciplines to the next generation. ~ Tohoru Masamune

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty. ~ Bertrand Russell

We want Florida to be first for jobs, and we must have a skilled workforce to reach that goal. By investing in science, technology, engineering and math education, we are ensuring our students are prepared for the jobs of the future. Our teachers are essential to preparing our students. ~ Rick Scott

I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn. ~ Archimedes

Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country. ~ David Hilbert

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Logic is invincible, because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic. ~ Pierre Boutroux

The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics. ~ Paul Halmos

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization. ~ John G. Kemeny

In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generations adds a new story to the old structure. ~ Hermann Hankel

What humans do with the language of mathematics is to describe patterns ... To grow mathematically children must be exposed to a rich variety of patterns appropriate to their own lives through which they can see variety, regularity, and interconnections. ~ Lynn Steen

In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection. ~ Hugo Rossi

It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think. ~ John Wesley Young

Beauty in mathematics is seeing the truth without effort. ~ George Polya

The title which I most covet is that of teacher. The writing of a research paper and the teaching of freshman calculus, and everything in between, falls under this rubric. Happy is the person who comes to understand something and then gets to explain it. ~ Marshall A. Cohen

I think investing in a good education has been key for me, although the investment was more in time than money. ~ Nouriel Roubini

I will tell you, in the case of education, you have to make the investment if you're going to get the return. There's no doubt about that. It's a proven fact the return is there if you make the investment. It really is about priorities. ~ Jon Tester

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities.
[Following the success of the confirmation of the existence of the planet Neptune, he considered the possibility of the discovery of a yet further planet.] ~ Urbain Le Verrier

Wherever you go, go with love, but never leave hope behind. ~ Debasish Mridha

A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. ~ Stephen Fry

I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit.
A mad, execution uniform,Ted Hughes

Poetry The Blue Flannel Suit