Math Quotations | Page 5

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

Geometry is the foundation of all painting.

I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself.

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

I'm not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety. I have a master's from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this. So obviously I want to be in the limelight in some capacity, or I want to be in entertainment in some capacity.

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?

I didn't know there were this many math guys," Hale said as they stepped onto the crowded concourse. Kat cleared her throat. "And women," he added. "Math women.

I don't believe we're hateful. I think mostly we're just asleep, but the math adds up the same.

But Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two.

We'll start cranking up probably next week. The common mistakes are mostly math errors and (people) forgetting to sign their returns.

The ultimate act of cowardice is the fat-headed wrestling guy sitting behind the frail kid in math class, clipping him on the ear, saying: 'What are you going to do about that, faggot?' That is cowardice. When the bullets start flying past that jock's saucer-shaped ears, that's not cowardice. That's payback.

Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.

In some ways, I never outgrew my adolescence. I wake up in the morning and think, 'Oh my God, I'm late for a math test!' But then I say, 'Wait a minute. I'm 40.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

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.

We have 2,500 students and an 8,000-seat basketball arena. You do the math on how important basketball is in Aberdeen.

I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

We cheated on our math tests, we carved some dirty words on the desk.

There's a fundamental disconnection in society in the way we live, this way we live that we take so for granted, and we've become very separate from one another and we don't really take lot of time to realize that. And the math is overwhelming to the point of despair, but the answers could be so simple.

My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada's nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.

We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.

The real irony is that the view of infinity as some forbidden zone or road to insanity - which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years - is precisely what Cantor's own work overturned. Saying that infinity drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon: it's not only wrong but insulting.

Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection.

My older brother was cool, so I was suddenly cool by association. And I totally dusted all my old math friends.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers - to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response - for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.

Maths is totally done differently to what I was teached when I was at school.

This much I'm sure of. Chances for winning = 1 - (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That's a fraction.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

Math is my favorite subject. It's the universal language. I like the fact that wherever you go in the whole world, two plus two will still be four.

I'm a strong believer that you have to have an equal opportunity to fail and to try things that are hard. I always tell my students, "Don't just take things that are easy for you. If you're really good at math, don't take just math. Take classes that make you write. If you're a really great writer, but bad at math, take math and make yourself work your way through it."

If I'd loved my chemistry teacher and my maths teacher, goodness knows what direction my life might have gone in. I remember there was a primary school teacher who really woke me up to the joys of school for about one year when I was ten. He made me interested in things I would otherwise not have been interested in - because he was a brilliant teacher. He was instrumental in making me think learning was quite exciting.

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.

We're no longer intimidated by math, because we're slowly redefining what math is.

I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it.

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...

Earlier today, President Bush said Kerry will be a tough and hard-charging opponent. That explains why Bush's nickname for Kerry is math.

We should only issue work-related visas if we really need them. There are 2.5 million native born American workers in the math and computer field who are currently out of work. It begs the question whether we truly need foreign workers.

The real value is connecting what kids do in math and science to a bigger world.

We obviously don't want our students to fail so we have taken measures such as tutorial classes in the concerned areas of math and science, and we will properly adjust our curriculum to be more successful.

We put science, and science and math education, second ... because we believe it's second only to the threat of a weapon of mass destruction (hitting) one of our cities,

There has been a shift in math instruction away from an emphasis on computation and drill, and more of an emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking, ... The changes to our math curriculum forces students to do more analysis.

When children start learning math in school, they already have a basic understanding of the concepts. This understanding should guide teachers to work on enhancing these skills.

We're trying to figure out ways that we can strengthen the math program for all of the learners that we teach.

We're not mathematically out of it, but the math we need, they haven't invented it yet.

We think the report in fact shows that the subsidies are a great thing for us. Do the math and you will see that every dollar invested with Wal-Mart has returned more than $30 for the community. We expect to see lots of other local governments will be asking for that $30 deal.

Why don't we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they'd also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.

To relax, I do yoga and meditate and do little math problems, and it's fun to check that part of your brain off and turn on a different part.

Too often, the vast middle is overlooked. Not every child is a math whiz kid and we shouldn't assume so.

To remain the world's high-tech leader, we must have more and better educated students entering math and science fields. The growing math and science gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is a potentially devastating crack in American competitiveness. The president has clearly recognized importance of this issue to our nation's economic strength.

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do.

When I was 18, science, physics, and math were my favorite. I was a bit of a nerd - the only girl with a lot of boys at chess championships.

The questions were geared more toward the language arts, and since I am a math and science person, I only offered little tidbits to my teammates who were more language-arts oriented.

This semester has been worse than other semesters. I am a senior taking three 400 level math classes, so I cannot predict when I will be in.

This was a great weekend for the Science of Racing and our new education partner, Drexel University's Math Forum. To go to the final round in our first race of 2006 is beyond belief.

To be able to get a jump and jump into fifth place in points ... we were looking at different math going into this race,

Two out of three middle school math teachers in California don't even have a math degree.

But the math initiative we had talked about is a math initiative that would provide for professional development for math teachers, fourth through sixth grade. That's what we advocate.

You are not going to get many math and science majors who are going to opt for teaching careers when they can make three times as much just walking in the door at an aerospace company.

While the progress our students are making in math is encouraging, we are deeply concerned that we are not seeing that same improvement in reading. Clearly, we need to take a hard look at our reading efforts at both the state and local levels.

While the predictions are all in fun, there is extremely sophisticated math behind them. Of course, we wouldn't advise any studio execs to make decisions based only on our predictions. If a studio does buy one of the films we've predicted to be a hit, our engineers have told me they'd be happy to attend any acquisition parties to provide the irrefutable statistical data to backup the studio's decision.

You can teach someone to use Excel, but if they don't know a thing about math in the first place, then it's not a very useful tool,

There appears to be a little bit of fuzzy math going on.

There is some math involved. Words have certain patterns and proportions and a lot of it is learning the mathematical nature of words. The rest is just having a sense for words.

Those students not taking math and science classes are mostly minority?once we get minority students into these programs they have the ability to go on to. Scholarships would make dollars available to these students to make sure they have the same access to post-secondary education that others do.

We found that students there were taking biology, chemistry and physics for three years in high school, Chinese students want to take math and science. Those are the cool subjects there.

(W)hen I stopped understanding math and science, my choice was made.

With four weeks to go you can't narrow it down yet. It's too early. The math is how you do it. Mathematically, everybody is still in it. As long as everybody is mathematically in it, I don't know how you can count anybody out of it.

We feel really good about our CATS scores and the progress we've made, ... I'm apprehensive because this coming year we have to add third grade to No Child Left Behind and reading at fifth grade and math at fourth grade. We're trying to find ways to keep the scores increasing.

You have to really do the math and figure out a good location.

Every time I have a birthday I do the math real quick and see how old he would have been.

Even though Dr. Olsen will be quite busy performing technical duties and conducting scientific experiments, he will also find time to speak with students from his beloved 'home' states of New York and New Jersey. We applaud Greg for his dedication to this mission, but also his drive to encourage young people to study science, math and astronomy by giving a first-hand description of the wonders of space.

Content knowledge is really important. I like math. It seemed really interested in getting people with math and science content out in the classes.

There's no math equation that equals ratings or demographics or even (takes into consideration) 'The Man Show.' What the (bleep) is 'The Man Show' audience? You either go up there and connect, or you go up there and you don't connect,

I started off majoring in math and computer science and then majored in journalism because I knew I wanted to become a writer one day.

Things like taking her math books to English class.

I've taught everything, ... I've taught kindergarten. I've taught adult school at night. I taught math in high school for nine years. I think I have broad experience. I made a purpose to study multi-age education and how it benefits children.

I understand how hard it is to force yourself to be someone different. By the end of high school, I had taken to doing my math homework up against a concealed wall during lunch because I was tired of socializing.

The state core (curriculum), I believe, supports the Alpine program. If you were to get the elementary math (teacher) endorsement program, you could look at it and the math is almost trivial. It's mostly about pedagogy.

The system won't allow special salaries for math and science teachers, who are sometimes said to be in short supply. It's hopeless.

The thought is, the earlier the better. The goal is to make them feel comfortable around health professionals. If they're comfortable at an early age, they can consider medicine as a possible career. Then, as they get older, they can think about taking more math and science classes.

I've never been a good math student, but you're not going to catch up if they're making free throws and we're not making jumpers.

I've always been interested in all sorts of things. Art, physics, history, philosophy, math -- they're all interesting. Making games just seems like a way to bring all these seemingly unrelated things together.

Reading and math scores nationally have been declining for past ten years. There's a real worry in America about whether children will be safe in school.

Advertising is turning into this math problem for them. At some point, who cares whether it's print or online or skywriting or whatever?

Once you know math really good, you will see things in a different light. It will help me financially because I will go to college and do things that I never thought of.

Any person with a little math sense can make up their mind as to how big this was. You look at the opponents we have left and the schedule we have left and you can figure out that obviously with a minute and a half left, we needed a goal.

The bottom line is we should take pleasure in the fact American kids are doing better in math. Math achievement is going up in the United States in the long term. It is not, however, where kids in the United States ought to be.

That's not to say that elementary teachers are not important, but we know we have a shortage in the math and science areas.

You start with the educational purpose, but with any technology, teens will find other uses for it than the main one. Almost all of them do things that we never get around to. Even the graphing calculators for math come with their own games, and the kids will discover them.

This is an open window on McDonald's food. The math tells the real story -- that McDonald's has the balance consumers are looking for.