Math Quotes

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all. ~ Michael Cunningham

We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders"5 of the previous generation. The danger of such a position is that we can forget to put our own feet on the ground. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

God has the Big Book, the beautiful proofs of mathematical theorems are listed here. ~ Paul Erdos

Most remarks made by children consist of correct ideas very badly expressed. A good teacher will be very wary of saying 'No, that's wrong.' Rather, he will try to discover the correct idea behind the inadequate expression. This is one of the most important principles in the whole of the art of teaching. ~ W.W. Sawyer

Though the structures and patterns of mathematics reflect the structure of, and resonate in, the human mind every bit as much as do the structures and patterns of music, human beings have developed no mathematical equivalent to a pair of ears. Mathematics can only be "seen" with the "eyes of the mind". It is as if we had no sense of hearing, so that only someone able to sight read music would be able to appreciate its patterns and harmonies. ~ Keith Devlin

The historical resonances are sharp. [Louis] Brandeis is nominated on Jan. 28, 1916. Confirmed on June 1. Waits 125 days between nomination and confirmation, which remains an unbroken record, although Merrick Garland will surpass it in July, if my math is right. Anti-Semitism was definitely not the central reason for the opposition, which tended to focus more on his anti-corporate radicalism, but it was a theme. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation. ~ Richard Feynman

The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea. ~ George Polya

There is a distinction between what may be called a problem and what may be considered an exercise. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little if any, original thought ... No exercise, then, can always be done with reasonbable dispatch and with a miniumum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require though on the part of the student. ~ Howard Whitley Eves

Math was a two-part exam and I once didn't go for the second part. I knew I'd done so badly on the first it was hopeless. I re-took it about four or five times. I think I eventually got it by getting the top GCSE grade. ~ Rob Brydon

Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities. ~ Amity Shlaes

The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts. ~ Lance Armstrong

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income. ~ Isaac Asimov

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

Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. ~ Janos Bolyai

Just as police and fire sirens reminded New Yorkers they were home, the sound of car bombs reminded me I was in Baghdad, which had become home for me. I was like a battered wife who can't leave the man abusing her. I had moved into stage four and assumed, as a matter of math, that I was going to die in Baghdad. But still I wanted to stay. ~ Richard Engel

Math has never made any sense to me. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Why does it have to hurt? Why does it have to be hard?" Tish asked me. "You know how math is your hardest class right now, but it's also where you're learning the most?" I explained. "It's like that. Life is about learning, and we learn best when things get hard. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

Math test tomorrow.
Check.
Complete lack of preparation for test.
Check. ~ Rick Riordan

The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking. ~ Megan Smith

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success. ~ Paul Dirac

What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the urge of imagination-of imagination which broke the roadway through the forest in order that cold logic might follow. ~ David Eugene Smith

I considered law and math. My Dad was a lawyer. I think though I would have ended up in physics if I didn't end up in computer science. ~ Bill Gates

I want my girls to love math. I want them to think that being a scientist is the coolest possible job on the planet. I want them to not be afraid to lean toward their femininity. ~ Jennifer Garner

I personally feel that the universe behaves more like a song than an equation because math is about static law and music is about dynamic expression. ~ Rick Delmonico

{Before the time of Benjamin Peirce it never occurred to anyone that mathematical research} was one of the things for which a mathematical department existed. Today it is a commonplace in all the leading universities. Peirce stood alone - a mountain peak whose absolute height might be hard to measure, but which towered above all the surrounding country. ~ Julian Coolidge

Every atheist who believes in morality, gravity, and does math is a closeted believer. ~ Todd Friel

Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be home looking at how the math tutor was today. But it is what it is. ~ Renee James

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. ~ Nicholas Murray Butler

Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH. ~ Rick Bayan

Everyday we have to go to classroom 107A, where portions of English, math and social studies are meted out like different nutrients of a hospital diet. ~ Emma Rathbone

Maybe I'll hurt you," I whisper as my eyes search his. "I'm broken Tucker. I'm hopelessly broken inside, and I'm not sure there are enough pieces in me to put back together. But when I'm with you, I feel like maybe I can actually be whole. ~ Denise Grover Swank

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. ~ Douglas Coupland

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Suddenly William loomed over him, scowling, snarling and bloody, his suit dirt-stained and ripped. "Do you know. How many strands. Of hair I lost. On my way down?"
Whatever. "Math was never my thing, but I'm gonna say you lost…a lot."
Electric-blues glittered with menace. "You are a cruel, sadistic bastard. My hair needs TLC and you…you… Damn you! I've gutted men for less."
"I know. I've watched you." Paris lumbered to his feet and scanned the rocky bank they stood upon, the crimson ocean lapping and bubbling in every direction. The drawbridge was only a fifty-yard dash away. "Don't kill the messenger, but I'm thinking you should change your dating profile to balding."
Masculine cheeks went scarlet as the big bad warrior struggled for a comeback.
…
"One of these days you're going to wake up," William finally said, "and I will have shaved you. Everywhere."
"Won't make a difference. Women will still want me. But you know what else? What I did to you wasn't cruel, Willy." He offered the warrior a white-flag grin. A trick. A lie. "This, however, is."
He grabbed William by the wrist, swung the man around and around before at last releasing him and hurling his body directly onto the bridge. ~ Gena Showalter

In law, we talk about a beautiful summation, or a beautiful judgment: and what we mean by that, of course, is the loveliness of not only its logic but its expression. And similarly, in math, when we talk about a beautiful proof, what we're recognizing is the simplicity of the proof, its ... elementalness, I suppose: its inevitability. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important ... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it? ~ Helen Keller

I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses. ~ Jordan Ellenberg

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all. ~ Shane Carruth

The basic skills of math, English and writing are not enough, ... You must develop a basic system of values to form and guide the use of these skills. The true test will not be what you learned in college, but how you used what you learned. ~ Jim Rogers

My basic philosophy of teaching was straightforward and deeply personal. I wanted to teach the way I wished that I myself had been taught. Which is to say, I hoped to convey the sheer joy of learning, the thrill of understanding things about the universe. I wanted to pass along to students not only the logic but the beauty of math and science. Furthermore, I wanted to do this in a way that would be equally helpful to kids studying a subject for the first time and for adults who wanted to refresh their knowledge; for students grappling with homework and for older people hoping to keep their minds active and supple. ~ Salman Khan

Who cares for Algebra?
Who delights in solving math?
I only want to live my life
Along the creative path. ~ Jennifer Niven

For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math. ~ Rachel Hartman

Respecting infinite sets, for example, Intuitionism is rabidly anti-Cantor and Formalism staunchly pro-Cantor, even though both Formalism and Intuitionism are anti-Plato and Cantor is a diehard Platonist. Which, migrainous or not, means we're back to metaphysics: the modern wrangle over math's procedures is ultimately a dispute over the ontological status of math entities. ~ David Foster Wallace

Our mornings were never "rise and shine." They were "rise and fight." They were loud and ravaging. They were heavy and unnerving, like the after-math of a war, with unresolved territorial disputes.
They were never serene, but they were beautiful. More beautiful than the smile you wear when you step out of the shower, more tempting than the sight of you brewing coffee from across the kitchen bar, more promising than a glorious victory, bigger than all our tumultuous past. Bigger than you. Bigger than I. ~ Malak El Halabi

This is a book for those of you who want to be parents as well as people, who don't want to feel guilty about taking some time for yourself or your relationship (if you're even in one). It's for those folks who might, every once in a while, want to get drunk, and have sloppy sex without worrying that they're going to roll over on their kid because you all sleep in a "family bed" since that's how they do it in Taiwan and they have the highest math scores of any country on earth. ~ Brett Berk

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.
Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street
and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry
eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics? ~ Richard Courant

Usually, girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher, Ms. Paz Jensen, made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college. ~ Ellen Ochoa

Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts. ~ Anonymous

If I do have kids, I can't wait because I'm excited to go back to school to help them with their homework and remember how to do simple math. I think it's about staying curious and not losing the sense of wonder. ~ Mamie Gummer

To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it. ~ Catherine Asaro

All my family has very good mathematical abilities - like, so dorky. I was the dork then in school - on any maths exams I'd get 100%. I just knew how to do maths and most people would hate it, but for some reason it just came. ~ Rebel Wilson

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi. ~ Richard Preston

When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and fix the leaky bathroom sink, all before dinner. For the longest time, I thought he was invincible. Above the petty problems that plagued normal people.
And now he was gone. ~ Rachel Vincent

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern. ~ Rudy Rucker

The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an increasingly popular method of instruction called "cooperative" or "small group" learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with "pods" of four or more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced the "Rules for Group Work," including, YOU CAN'T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS EVERYONE IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION. ~ Susan Cain

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

I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between. ~ George Polya

He was right. I was letting myself get distracted, like a rabbit doing math problems instead of looking for foxes. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It's like having locked-in syndrome, except you're still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you're limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren't. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn't like math in high school and they don't like it now. ~ Douglas Coupland

If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy) ... ~ Doug Pierce

No one really buys records anymore. You can look at sales and do that math real quick. Unfortunately, it's fast food in the music industry. People don't ingest full records anymore. ~ Tommy Lee

Some kids are good at math, some kids can run, and acting was an interest of mine. Because I knew you could do it for a living I decided, that's what I'm going to do. ~ Jonny Lee Miller

When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective. ~ Lisa Randall

Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out. ~ Amanda Ripley

I mean can you walk to school on your own? Can you study science? Can you study math? Can you go to a normal school? Do you need to go to a special school? What is going to become of you when you grow up? Are you going to have to live on social security and SSI? ~ Sheena Iyengar

I don't have the time. It would take me too long to go through all of the math. ~ Paul Ryan

Uniform Convergence & Associated Aracana item (d) for exceptional points, which again please recall can also be called 'discontinuities'. (N.B.: Some math classes also use singularity to mean exceptional point, which is both confusing and intriguing since the term also refers to Black Holes, which in a sense is what discontinuities are.) ~ David Foster Wallace

Students need to decide, 'All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?' - such an underrepresented question in math curriculum. ~ Dan Meyer

Behavior is math: Truth is found in the sum of its parts. ~ Steve Maraboli

Just do the math. In the next 50 to 75 years, people will be living to be 130 and 140. They'll be working until they're 100. It's incredible. ~ Willard Scott

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite - all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't. ~ Dara Horn

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense. ~ William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks ... Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can. ~ Silvanus P. Thompson

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem. ~ Andrew Wiles

I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it. ~ Linda M. Godwin

Russell is reputed at a dinner party once to have said, 'Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.' Well, it is very easy to show this by mathematical means. But, as usual, Russell was much cleverer than this. Somebody at the dinner table said, 'Oh, come on!' He said, 'Well, name an inconsistent proposition,' and the man said, 'Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.' 'All right,' said Russell, 'what do you want me to prove?' The man said, 'I want you to prove that you're the pope.' 'Why,' said Russell, 'the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one. ~ Jacob Bronowski

Most children, even very bright ones, need constant review and practice to truly own a concept in grammar, math or science. In schools today, on paper it may appear that kids are learning skills, but in reality they are only renting them, soon to forget what they've learned over the weekend or summer vacation. ~ Rafe Esquith

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald A. Fisher

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. ~ Paul R. Halmos

Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection. ~ Hermann Weyl

There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that. ~ Olivia Newton-John

That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It's the same all over the world. ~ Ben Sherwood

Besides it is an error to believe that rigour is the enemy of simplicity. On the contrary we find it confirmed by numerous examples that the rigorous method is at the same time the simpler and the more easily comprehended. The very effort for rigor forces us to find out simpler methods of proof. ~ David Hilbert

We come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing ... We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature. ~ Neil Postman

A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability - whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed - makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed - as a gift - are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts - who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort - pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task - grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions). ~ Cordelia Fine

So what should we say when children complete a task - say, math problems - quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let's do something you can really learn from! ~ Carol S. Dweck

As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math. ~ Robert C. Merton

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

What the hell is wrong with me? This isn't the first time I've asked myself this question, in a multitude of situations. But this time specifically I'm referring to my inability to feel anything when being kissed by a man. Maybe I'm just too broken. Thant's the part that scares me the most. That I'm too broken to love. ~ Denise Grover Swank

What the hell did magic wands have to do with helping girls learn math and science? He'd been good at both. He could have helped them with math and science. Weren't these girls supposed to be building skills? Screw magic wands. He'd have handed out some fucking calculators. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper. ~ George Polya

There are two versions of math in the lives of many Americans: the strange and boring subject that they encountered in classrooms and an interesting set of ideas that is the math of the world, and is curiously different and surprisingly engaging. Our task is to introduce this second version to today's students, get them excited about math, and prepare them for the future. ~ Jo Boaler

Apart from two periods of intense study, of music between the ages of 12 and 14 and of mathematics between the ages of 14 and 16, I coasted, daydreaming, through most of my school years. ~ James Black

It was the Greeks who turned math into an abstract system, a special symbolic language that allows people not just to describe the concrete world but to account for its deepest patterns and laws. ~ David Foster Wallace

Education is learning more than it is being taught. It's the chemistry of curiosity exposed to information. In that sense all of life is potentially school. And even I can pass that. ~ Bob Guccione, Jr.

When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Music, to me, is not math or science. It is a language. ~ Russell Malone