2024-02-17
Mathematics ScienceThe following table is a running list of some of my favourite quotes.
I do not necessarily agree with all of them. The value of quotes (and non-fiction books for that matter) isn't necessarily to inform you - Their value is that they get you to think. In fact, if you strongly disagree with a quote, that can be a good thing.
| Quote | Author |
|---|---|
| One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them. | Heinrich Hertz |
| The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. | Hans Hofmann |
| The Book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics. | Galileo Galilei |
| A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures. | Edsger W Dijkstra |
| It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. | Paul Dirac |
| The famous book of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy marked the epoch of a great revolution in physics. The method followed by its illustrious author Sir Newton...spread the light of mathematics on a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjectures and hypotheses. | Alexis Clairaut, on Newton's Principia |
| Using a term like nonlinear science is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals. | Stanislaw Ulam |
| Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? | Stephen Hawking |
| Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. [...] Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate. | Bertrand Russell |
| Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a 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. | Bertrand Russell |
| Don't anthropomorphise computers...they don't like it. | Seen in Art of Electronics 3rd Edition by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill |
| The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics, and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking. | John von Neumann |