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Mathematical Quotes
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How can a modern social anthropologist... embark upon generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfying conclusion?... thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as constituting a mathematical pattern.
Edmund Leach
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It has lately become the fashion, at least among the younger school of biologists, to attach small value to natural selection, if not, indeed, to regard it as a superseded formula; mathematical proofs are demanded or, at any rate, desired.
August Weismann
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Thus results the plain assurance that the future of Thought, and therefore of History, lies in the hands of the physicists, and that the future historian must seek his education in the world of mathematical physics. Nothing can be expected from further study on the old lines.
Henry Adams
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The lure of mathematics is hard to resist. When, by dint of great effort and ingenuity, a previously vague, ill-formed idea is encapsulated in a neat mathematical formulation, it is impossible to suppress the feeling that some profound truth has been discovered.
David Lindley (physicist)
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There is no part of mathematical science more truly calculated to interest and surprize mankind, than the measurement of the relative positions and distances of inaccessible objects.
William Jones (philologist)
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All the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science — our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest — proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience.
William James
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No amount of logical or mathematical investigation alone, moreover, can ever establish a fact.
Frederick L. Barry
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Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.
Charles Kingsley
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The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
Leopold Infeld
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Nutrition is not a mathematical equation in which two plus two is four. The food we put in our mouths doesn't control our nutrition-not entirely. What our bodies do with that food does.
T. Colin Campbell
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The astronomy which is not mathematical is what is so ludicrously called "Geography of the Heavens" - is not astronomy at all.
Maria Mitchell
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The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid's first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.
John Allen Paulos
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Strategy means the art of recognizing the main problems, attacking them at their weak points, setting up future lines of advance. Mathematical strategy is concerned with long-range objectives; it requires a deep understanding of broad trends and of the evolution of ideas over long periods.
André Weil
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He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.
Simon Newcomb
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Mathematical sciences require theories, molecular biology facts.
David Berlinski
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Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?
Fulton J. Sheen
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the mathematical physicist... obtains much prestige from the physicists because they are impressed with the amount of mathematics he knows, and much prestige from the mathematicians, because they are impressed with the amount of physics he knows.
William Francis Gray Swann
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We cannot get more out of the mathematical mill than we put into it, though we may get it in a form infinitely more useful for our purpose.
John Hopkinson
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No part of mathematics or mathematical physics involves considerations so strange or so difficult to handle correctly, and there is no subject upon which opinions have been more freely hazarded by the ignorant, or rational dissent more unambiguously expressed by the learned.
Augustus De Morgan
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We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.
Leonard Susskind
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Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.
Max Bill
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Shameless ignorance in regard to such serious intellectual conquests as are embodied in the mathematical literature does not represent a normal condition on the part of those interested in the history of the human race.
George Abram Miller
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The origin is a mathematical point, something that has sucked from the concept of a place its essential property, that of being here rather than there, the infinitely extended line itself balanced perfectly on that slim, solitary, and singular spike.
David Berlinski
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Mathematics is a cruel profession. Solving a mathematical problem is for most mathematicians an arduous and lengthy process which may take years, even a lifetime. The final conquest of the truth comes, if ever, inevitably tinged with disillusion, soured by the realization of the ultimate irrelevance of all intellectual endeavor.
Gian-Carlo Rota
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Ignazio Silone
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