Math Terms Quotes & Sayings

I am intentionally avoiding the standard term which, by the way, did not exist in Euler's time. One of the ugliest outgrowths of the "new math" was the premature introduction of technical terms. — George Polya

What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment ... If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience. — Richard P. Feynman

Now Eli was my new neighbor. Which was fine with me because I sucked at Math. Math and I were not on speaking terms. — Shelly Crane

No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility. — Haruki Murakami

What he found was the geometry of the universe. Looking at the bubbles made by the Wego's propellers, he recalled his boarding school math teachers, who had taught him to measure a sphere's volume in terms of pi. He also remembered that pi was an irrational number, a decimal that never ended. He asked himself how nature could ever make bubbles in such circumstances. Did nature approximate? The rules his teachers had taught him must be mistaken. Spheres ought to be understood in terms of the forces that made them. At the age of twenty-one, Bucky determined that the universe had no objects. Geometry described forces. It was an insight bound to shape Bucky's entire worldview - informing every future invention - but — Jonathan Keats