It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mat...
Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pas...
Fiction writing is art. It therefore, has few mathematical or scientific limits to its evolution. The writer must always push forward, experiment, and strive to reach new levels of storytelling. Good fiction comments on reality, but transports the re...
No human investigation can be called real knowledge if it does not pass through mathematical demonstrations; and if you say that the kinds of knowledge that begin and end in the mind have any value as truth, this cannot be conceded, but rather must b...
In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly ob...
I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that i...
The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God,...
I was always told that I was good in mathematics, and I guess my grades and standardized test scores supported that. My worst subjects were those that generally involved a lot of reading - English and history. So, having good test scores in math and ...
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly...
I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I'm not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did....
The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analys...
I took a break from acting for four years to get a degree in mathematics at UCLA, and during that time I had the rare opportunity to actually do research as an undergraduate. And myself and two other people co-authored a new theorem: Percolation and ...
Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like ma...
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future resear...
At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there n...
Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. . . Beauty will dance with an...
It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness--cry and then walk--but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that hap...
It's not because I want to make out with her." Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to dete...
[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what m...
When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the phi...
I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment o...
