Quotes & Sayings About Calculus

If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics ... to write poetry ... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What's so special about humans ... ?', I'm at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don't see why we'd be special ... because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I'm not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
... I could pose the same kinds of questions of you ... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say ... 'What's so special about that? — Shelly Kagan

Many organizations help businesses to stay on top of what's changing or likely to change. It's important for executives and managers who focus on a company's health coverage to stay up-to-speed on what's happening, and it's important for those in the C-suite to understand the changes to factor these new variables into their strategic planning calculus. — John E. McDonough

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. "Q!" he shouted over the music. "How good does this feel?" And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. "It beats calculus, — John Green

There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school - roughly 15 years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply. — Carl Sagan

A month's intelligent instruction in the theory of numbes ought to be twice as instructive, twice as useful, and at least 10 times as entertaining as the same amount of 'calculus for engineers'. — G.H. Hardy

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it. — Richard P. Feynman

Getting married early is like wrestling with calculus on a merry trip to Las Vegas! — Kiran Joshi

Magic was ugly - -a hard bargain with the universe, a calculus of pain. — Laini Taylor

My sub doesn't pay for me," he says, pulling me to my feet. "That just doesn't happen."
"But we ordered so much," I say helplessly.
"It made you happy," he says simply. "Now I get to play with you. And that makes me happy."
"I don't think it's that simple an equation."
"Maybe not," he concedes. "But then, if if sex were the same thing as math, a lot more people would be lining up to take calculus. — Nenia Campbell

But here, Ms. Pelletier, is the thing. Without infinitesimals, the calculus as we know and love it simply wouldn't exist. It is these nearly-zero, sort-of-zero, sometimes-zero quantities that allow us to understand the world. Something which seems to be nearly nothing turns out to be crucial to everything. So though I, or for you that matter, or any of us, may be, as a collection of atoms, practically indistinguishable from zero, this does not necessarily mean we are insignificant. Indeed, it may be that we are actually crucially important. — Brendan Halpin

We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies. — Malala Yousafzai

Price mostly meanders around recent price until a big shift in opinion occurs, causing price to jump up or down. This is crudely modeled by quants using something called a jump-diffusion process model. Again, what does this have to do with an asset's true intrinsic value? Not much. Fortunately, the value-focused investor doesn't have to worry about these statistical methods and jargon. Stochastic calculus, information theory, GARCH variants, statistics, or time-series analysis is interesting if you're into it, but for the value investor, it is mostly noise and not worth pursuing. The value investor needs to accept that often price can be wrong for long periods and occasionally offers interesting discounts to value. — Nick Gogerty

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another. — Steven Johnson

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America's fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably continue to refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. That — Sebastian Junger

Dude, you're such a geek. And that's coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave — John Green

At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, "out of a curiosity to see what there was in it." He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus. — Carl Sagan

An announcement of [Christopher] Zeeman's lecture at Northwestern University in the spring of 1977 contains a quote describing catastrophe theory as the most important development in mathematics since the invention of calculus 300 years ago. — Stephen Smale

Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations. — James Clerk Maxwell

He flashed his wicked grin and lowered his voice. "Mrs. Frost always runs late. I could kiss you now and give the crowd what they're looking for."
That would be an awesome way to start class. I licked my lips and whispered, "You are going to get me in so much trouble."
"Damn straight." Noah caressed my cheek before heading to his seat in the back.
I settled in my seat and spent the entire hour trying to keep my mind focused on calculus and not on kissing Noah Hutchins. — Katie McGarry

See, the thing is, I had a little misunderstanding with Trent Gibson in Pre-Calculus earlier. I dropped my textbook on his face - accidentally, while we were discussing some ... equations - and he thought I was trying to brain him. So of course, he narked to Shoemaker, and apparently accidents are grounds for disciplinary action these days. — Isobel Irons

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension. — John Wallis

Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus abouth the worth of one's own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? — Neel Mukherjee

Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined. — Ronald Ross

The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman. — Francois Arago

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus ... — Celia Green

With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part. — Richard Courant

You always debate with yourself about whether or not you made the right decision. And you have to then give the person that you're working for your best judgment based on your understanding of the facts, but also the calculus you use to make a determination about what's the best way to go forward. — John O. Brennan

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all" - who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness. — Karen Russell

This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on. — Marvin Minsky

The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the application of physical truth in the broadest sense of the word. — William Fogg Osgood

There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again. That is perhaps the greatest gift one can gain by delving into calculus: It is a whole new way of looking at the world, accessible only through the realm of mathematics. — Jennifer Ouellette

Everything tries to be round. — Black Elk

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. — Saidiya V. Hartman

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point. — John Banville

The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance. — Edward Mills Purcell

Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum. — Leonhard Euler

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God — William Lane Craig

Self esteem,' said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother's words, 'is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not - there you have self esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important. — Leo Tolstoy

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven't learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn't learned to add or multiply, at least the first time. — Richard Bach

"I see it, but I don't believe it." — Richard Dedekind

We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive was different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it occurred with Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I believed I would find her. — John Green

In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one's grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy. — Noam Chomsky

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else. — Andrew Holleran

The next morning the first thought that came to my mind was "Calculus of love". When love tends to infinity, thinko tends to zero. — Ram Vignesh

Therefore, I have attacted [the problem of the catenary] which I had hitherto not attempted, and with my key [the differential calculus] happily opened its secret.
Acta eruditorum — Gottfried Leibniz

Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man. But on the whole the history of science is fair, and this is particularly true in mathematics. No other subject has such clear-cut or unanimously accepted standards, and the men who are remembered are almost always the men who merit it. Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments. — G.H. Hardy

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General. — W.S. Gilbert

Of course, the methods for human population control are enormously controversial. One contraceptive measure seems to be humane and acceptable: If you teach calculus to teenage girls, they go on to have far fewer babies. Calculus is the contraceptive of the future. It doesn't work for boys. — Kenneth S. Deffeyes

Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x. — Andrew Sturm

Computer science is to biology what calculus is to physics. It's the natural mathematical technique that best maps the character of the subject. — Harold Morowitz

In the calculus of good deeds you have the most to gain. — Naguib Mahfouz

Calculus is the most powerful weapon of thought yet devised by the wit of man. — Wallace B. Smith

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent
war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive. — Susan Sontag

We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others. — Michael Eric Dyson

That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at. — Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (i.e. those that hang out in the climate blogosphere). Willis Eschenbach's help is needed in translating this for the WUWT crowd. — Judith Curry

I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus. — Debi Thomas

You know those high school teachers who so quintessentially and stereotypically embody their subject matter that it is as if they were cast by a director? Mr. Carter was like that. I did not know they still made glasses like his glasses. He told us his dog was named "Dooty," short for Dooty Dexy, which is a phoneticized version of the calculus formula for second derivatives. — Katie Heaney

Without doubt, matter is unlimited in extent, and, in this sense, infinite; and the forces of Nature mould it into an innumerable number of worlds. Would it be at all astonishing if, from the universal dice-box, out of an innumberable number of throws, there should be thrown out one world infinitely perfect? Nay, does not the calculus of probabilities prove to us that one such world out of an infinite number, must be produced of necessity? — William Batchelder Greene

Dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom and democracy" within its domains. — Noam Chomsky

Newton, of course, was the inventor of differential calculus so his place in the tale is quite special. — Kit Williams

Ambition without knowledge is like a boat on dry land -movie - Karate kid"What is the calculus of innovation?" "The calculus of innovation is really quite simple: knowledge drives innovation, innovation drives productivity, productivity drives our economic growth." — William R. Brody

Love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart. — Sylvia Plath

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth. — Carol Tavris

Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of the unity of the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science which have been by slow degrees vouchsafed to man, and are still granted in these latter times by the Differential Calculus, now superseded by the Higher Algebra, all of which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient Mind from eternity. — Mary Somerville

Geometric calculus consists in a system of operations analogous to those of algebraic calculus, but in which the entities on which the calculations are carried out, instead of being numbers, are geometric entities which we shall define. — Giuseppe Peano

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules
it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be. — Bertrand Russell

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.' — Amity Shlaes

When physicists create a mathematical model of a physical process, they rely on the mathematical framework that can represent that process as closely as possible. When Newton developed a model of forces and motion, the appropriate mathematical framework was calculus. When Einstein developed a model of wave-particle motion, he relied on the mathematics of wave equations and eigenvalues. For many models in scientific computation, the computational framework that best aligns with our need is object orientation. — Anthony Scopatz

The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain. — William Stanley Jevons

For each successive class of phenomena, a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. — Henry John Stephen Smith

That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart. — E. O. Wilson

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin. — Thomm Quackenbush

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking. — John Von Neumann

After years of finding mathematics easy, I finally reached integral calculus and came up against a barrier. I realized that this was as far as I could go, and to this day I have never successfully gone beyond it in any but the most superficial way. — Isaac Asimov

The ultimate goal of a meteorologist is to set up differential equations of the movements of the air and to obtain, as their integral, the general atmospheric circulation, and as particular integrals the cyclones, anticyclones, tornados, and thunderstorms. — Andrija Maurovic

History was easy, but I don't know about the Calculus. It seemed like it was making sense, so that probably means I failed. — Stephenie Meyer

One good thing about teaching calculus is that you develop a hardened attitude towards repeating yourself. — Philip J. Hanlon

Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results; but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw there from. Whenever calculus is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give to speculation the deceptive guise of investment. — Benjamin Graham

If the calculus is much like a cathedral, its construction the work of centuries, it remained until the nineteenth century a cathedral suspiciously suspended in midair, the thing simply hanging there, with no one absolutely convinced that one day the gorgeous and elaborate structure would not come crashing down and fracture in a thousand pieces. — David Berlinski

Well, I live a double life. Tonight, I'll escort you to dinner. Then I have to rush home and finish my calculus homework.'
'You're not joking, are you?'
'I never joke about calculus homework. — Rick Riordan

It is the invaluable merit of the great Basle mathematician Leonard Euler, to have freed the analytical calculus from all geometric bounds, and thus to have established analysis as an independent science, which from his time on has maintained an unchallenged leadership in the field of mathematics. — Thomas Reid

men and women perform a different sexual calculus. As Harper's put it perfectly: "Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn't. — Christian Rudder

Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. "When I finish this process," he explained, "I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch." In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply perform calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. "I want my students to construct their own understanding," he explains, "so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem. — Ken Bain

In the calculus of western interests, there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance. — Tariq Ali

These ... tables (values of trignometric functions), constructed by means of new techniques based principally on the calculus of differences, are one of the most beautiful monuments ever erected to science. — Adrien-Marie Legendre

You burros have calculus in your blood. — Jaime Escalante

The cookbook gives a detailed description of ingredients and procedures but no proofs for its prescriptions or reasons for its recipes; the proof of the pudding is in the eating ... Mathematics cannot be tested in exactly the same manner as a pudding; if all sorts of reasoning are debarred, a course of calculus may easily become an incoherent inventory of indigestible information. — George Polya

You can't teach calculus to a chimpanzee. So just share your banana. — John Rachel

Gout produces calculus in the kidney ... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout. — Thomas Sydenham

Be that as it may, Leibnitz was never able to explain the principles of his calculus clearly, and this shows that there was something in it that was beyond him, something that was as it were imposed upon him without his being conscious of it; had he taken this into account, he most certainly would not have engaged in any dispute over 'priority' with Newton. Besides, these sorts of disputes are always completely vain, for ideas, insofar as they are true, are not the property of anyone, despite what modern 'individualism' might have to say; it is only error that can properly be attributed to human individuals. — Rene Guenon

If everything about life could be as simple as calculus, my world would be just perfect." -Mia — S.T. Bende

Leadership calculus: always choose to rise over run. — Ryan Lilly

We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus. — Ed Catmull

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. — Stanislaw Lem

Looking at numbers as groups of rocks may seem unusual, but actually it's as old as math itself. The word "calculate" reflects that legacy - it comes from the Latin word calculus, meaning a pebble used for counting. To enjoy working with numbers you don't have to be Einstein (German for "one stone"), but it might help to have rocks in your head. — Steven Strogatz

No matter how significant or life-changing your greatest hit or miss might be, neither even begins to define who you are. Each of us is a product of all our experiences and all our interactions with other people. To cite calculus, we are the area under the curve. — Colin Powell