Arithmetical Quotes & Sayings

The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself. — Howard Aiken

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical. — Franz Kafka

After a long analysis of Robson's suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet's numbers constant. — Julian Barnes

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed. — Ambrose Bierce

It is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the mind of the "goyim" the very principle of god-head and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs — Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion

I'll wait for you. Come back.
The words were not meaningless, but they didn't touch him now.
It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion.
Waiting.
Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. — Ian McEwan

The arithmetical symbols are written diagrams and the geometrical figures are graphic formulas. — David Hilbert

Twenty-four hundred years ago, the ageing and grumpy Plato, in Book VII of the Laws, gave his definition of scientific illiteracy: Who is unable to count one, two, three, or to distinguish odd from even numbers, or is unable to count at all, or reckon night and day, and who is totally unacquainted with the revolution of the Sun and Moon, and the other stars . . . All freemen, I conceive, should learn as much of these branches of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns the alphabet. In that country arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement ... I ... have late in life heard with amazement of our ignorance in these matters; to me we appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Greeks. — Anonymous

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage's Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly. — Ada Lovelace

It is not the job of mathematicians ... to do correct arithmetical operations. It is the job of bank accountants. — Samuil Shatunovsky

Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been. — Plato

I then began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connexion with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry. — Henri Poincare

Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations - riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever. — Stieg Larsson

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals. — Blaise Pascal

What are numbers? What is the nature of arithmetical truth? — Gottlob Frege

Youth is an arithmetical statement of passing interest, each hour eats it up. — Stevie Smith

Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. — Thomas Robert Malthus

We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarls to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skein, or indeed, if we may be permitted one more stock phrase, in the skein of life. — Jose Saramago

And in terms of welfare, of course, the loss suffered will be much greater than the loss in merely arithmetical terms, because the psychological losses of those who are unemployed will greatly outweigh the psychological gains of those with a slightly higher income in terms of purchasing power. — Henry Hazlitt

Science in its everyday practice is much closer to art than to philosophy. When I look at Godel's proof of his undecidability theorem, I do not see a philosophical argument. The proof is a soaring piece of architecture, as unique and as lovely as Chartres Cathedral. Godel took Hilbert's formalized axioms of mathematics as his building blocks and built out of them a lofty structure of ideas into which he could finally insert his undecidable arithmetical statement as the keystone of the arch. The proof is a great work of art. It is a construction, not a reduction. It destroyed Hilbert's dream of reducing all mathematics to a few equations, and replaced it with a greater dream of mathematics as an endlessly growing realm of ideas. Godel proved that in mathematics the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Every formalization of mathematics raises questions that reach beyond the limits of the formalism into unexplored territory. — Freeman Dyson

Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse. — H.P. Lovecraft

Sir Richard sighed. "Rid yourself of the notion that I cherish any villainous designs upon your person," he said. "I imagine I might well be your father. How old are you?"
"I am turned seventeen."
"Well, I am nearly thirty," said Sir Richard.
Miss Creed worked this out. "You couldn't possibly be my father!"
"I am far too drunk to solve arithmetical problems. Let it suffice that I have not the slightest intention of making love to you. — Georgette Heyer

Sogol's aim was to measure the power of thought as an absolute value.
"This power," said Sogol, "is arithmetical. In fact, all thought is a capacity to grasp the divisions of a whole. Now, numbers are nothing but the divisions of the unity, that is, the divisions of absolutely any whole. In myself and others, I began to observe how many numbers a man can really conceive, that is, how many he can represent to himself without breaking them up or jotting them down: how many successive consequences of a principle he can grasp at once, instantaneously; how many inclusions of species as kind; how many relations of cause and effect, of ends to means; and I never found a number higher than four. And yet, this number four corresponded to an exceptional mental effort, which I obtained only rarely. The thought of an idiot stopped at one, and the ordinary thought of most people goes up to two, sometimes three, very rarely to four. — Rene Daumal

Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity. — Jean-Baptiste Say

[T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

If you object (as some of us did to Dr. Goris) that Cantor's transfinite numbers aren't really numbers at all but rather sets, then be apprised that what, say, 'P(Infinity to the Infinity +n), really is is a symbol for the number of members in a given set, the same way '3' is a symbol for the number of members in the set {1,2,3}. And since the transfinites are provably distinct and compose an infinite ordered sequence just like the integers,they really are numbers, symbolizable (for now) by Cantor's well-known system of alephs or '(Aleph symbol's). And, as true numbers, transfinites turn out to be susceptible to the same kinds of arithmetical relations and operations as regular numbers-although, just as with 0, the rules for these operations are very different in the case of (Alephs) and have to be independently established and proved. — David Foster Wallace

This is a collaboration between a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer. It sounds like a joke, a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer walk into a bar ... — Jordan Ellenberg

The concentration and reciprocal effect of industry and agriculture conjoin in a growth of productive powers, which increases more in geometrical than in arithmetical proportion. — Friedrich List

In other words these children, by avoiding the early drill on combinations, tables, and that sort of thing, had been able, in one year, to attain the level of accomplishment which the traditionally taught children had reached after three and one-half years of arithmetical drill. — Louis P. Benezet

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. — John Von Neumann

...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy away from our Christmas Tree! — Charles Dickens

In pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought. — Friedrich Engels

The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. — Arthur Conan Doyle

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer. — George Bernard Shaw

If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture. — Lewis Mumford

Here I beg you to observe in passing that the scruples that prevented ancient writers from using arithmetical terms in geometry, and which can only be a consequence of their inability to perceive clearly the relation between these two subjects, introduced much obscurity and confusion into their explanations. — Rene Descartes