Ian Stewart Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

The universe may appear to be a storm-tossed ocean of change, but... change obeys rules.

Ian Stewart
Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it's true. Otherwise, we won't know anything at all.

Ian Stewart
Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

Ian Stewart
The Mathiverse transcends Time and Space... it transcends Intelligence and Extelligence... it transcends Thought; it transcends Transcedence itself.

Ian Stewart
Mathematicians don't worry about what things really are. They just want to find effective ways to work out what they can do.

Ian Stewart
Nature is nothing if not rhythmic, and its rhythms are many and varied.

Ian Stewart
Proofs knit the fabric of mathematics together, and if a single thread is weak, the entire fabric may unravel.

Ian Stewart
There is naught in all that science has disclosed to man more utterly - one might say more hopelessly - mysterious than that power by which in an instant, throughout the whole universe, matter acts on matter.

Ian Stewart
Our world is not static: new problems constantly arise, and old answers often stop working. Like Lewis Carrol's Red Queen, we must run very fast in order to stand still.

Ian Stewart
Each of nature's patterns is a puzzle, nearly always a deep one.

Ian Stewart
Science is a collective activity, and the actions of each individual resonate and interact with those of the others in a pattern so gigantic that we can no more comprehend the whole than a blood cell can comprehend how its host feels when it mashes a finger in a car door.

Ian Stewart
Mathematics is not just a collection of isolated facts: it is more like a landscape; it has an inherent geography that its users and creators employ to navigate through what would otherwise be an impenetrable jungle.

Ian Stewart
It's amazing how long it can take to see the obvious. But of course it's only obvious now.

Ian Stewart
Who would have imagined that something as straightforward as the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4...) could give birth to anything so baffling as the prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11.)?

Ian Stewart
One of the biggest problems of mathematics is to explain to everyone else what it is all about.

Ian Stewart
I may not understand it, but it sure looks important to me.

Ian Stewart
To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.

Ian Stewart
The power of equations lies in the philosophically difficult correspondence between mathematics, a collective creation of human minds, and an external physical reality. Equations model deep patterns in the outside world. By learning to value equations, and to read the stories they tell, we can uncover vital features of the world around us...

Ian Stewart
Mathematics rests on numbers but is not limited to them.

Ian Stewart
If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Ian Stewart
Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.

Ian Stewart
Many pages have been expended on polemics in favor of rigor over intuition, or of intuition over rigor. Both extremes miss the point: the power of mathematics lies precisely in the combination of intuition and rigor.

Ian Stewart
A person who insists on understanding every tiny step before going on to the next is liable to concentrate so much on looking at his feet that he fails to realize he is walking in the wrong direction.

Ian Stewart
Not all ideas are mathematics; but all good mathematics must contain an idea.

Ian Stewart
Perhaps God can play dice, and create a universe of complete law and order, in the same breath.

Ian Stewart
The true mathematician is not a juggler of numbers, but a juggler of concepts.

Ian Stewart
An intuitive proof allows you to understand why the theorem must be true; the logic merely provides firm grounds to show that it is true.

Ian Stewart
Genes are not like engineering blueprints; they are more like recipes in a cookbook. They tell us what ingredients to use, in what quantities, and in what order—but they do not provide a complete, accurate plan of the final result.

Ian Stewart
Mathematics is to nature as Sherlock Holmes is to evidence.

Ian Stewart
Our world rests on mathematical foundations, and mathematics is unavoidably embedded in our global culture.

Ian Stewart