Square Root Quotes & Sayings

Hence 8197. He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect. — Lee Child

The Planeswalker know
YOu take the card from the library
And bury it when you're done.
On the path, you face history.
Walk the path, do the math:

Start with the prime numbers under 100
Whose digits give you 10.
Choose the happy median.
Add it to: The square root of
The cube of five divided by
The sum of 3 and 2. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial? — John Perry

If its about the existence of god, you may as well ask me, what the square root of an elephant is? — Steve Merrick

Irrationality is the square root of all evil — Douglas Hofstadter

Don't you see, gentlemen? Reason is a fine thing, there's no question about it, but reason is only reason and only satisfies man's rational faculties, whereas desire is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is of the whole of human life, along with reason and all our head-scratching ... not just the extraction of a square root. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it. — Philip Pullman

The square root of nothing. — R.D. Laing

And when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still, — Tim O'Brien

Square root of a cosine? How is that ever going to be useful? — Aprilynne Pike

I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel. — Marcel Proust

Love isn't roses. It's those little square caramels and a root beer from the gas station because he knows that's your favorite snack. It's watching a musical with you without groaning. It's handing you your glasses at night because he knows you're too blind to find your way to the bathroom without them. Love is awkward. — R.K. Ryals

Sure, there were people from Missouri and Illinois who grew up Cardinals fans and migrated to New York for work or love. Cardinals fans congregate periodically at Foley's near Herald Square to root for the team of their childhood, up there on the TV screen. — George Vecsey

The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful. — Carson McCullers

The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number. — Keith Devlin

I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The square root of I is I. — Vladimir Nabokov

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. — Tim O'Brien

In other words, the square root of fuckall is fuckall. — Kresley Cole

No one fully understands spinors. Their algebra is formally understood but their general significance is mysterious. In some sense they describe the 'square root' of geometry and, just as understanding the square root of -1 took centuries, the same might be true of spinors. — Michael Atiyah

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one ... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it. — Philip Pullman

To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
- A poem called DIGGING. — Edward Thomas

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators. — Ann Patchett

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon. — Stephen Leacock

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. — Terry Pratchett

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. — Terry Pratchett

Is that what happened to Mercier?" "No - not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi's work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon." Clavain raised an eyebrow. "The other side?" "The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply." "You're talking about tachyonic matter," Clavain said. "Matter travelling faster than light. — Alastair Reynolds

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice. — Bill Nye

Awesome."
"Awesome squared."
"Awesome cubed."
"Awesome to the power of infinity."
"The square root of awesome is-"
"-Asha." We finish at the same time and laugh. — Hannah Harrington

Did you know that in mathematics they determined what was real by what was not imaginary?" Finn's voice was just a soft rumble beneath my fingertips that had found his lips
"What?"
"When mathematicians came up with imaginary numbers, accepted them, defined them, they had to come up with a name for everything that wasn't imaginary. Everything that wasn't an imaginary number from that point on became a 'real' number."
What's an imaginary number?"
"The square root of negative one is an imaginary number."
"Is that all?"
"Any number that was once the square root of a negative number becomes an imaginary number. Square root of -4 becomes 2i, square root of -100 becomes 10i."
"Is infinity an imaginary number?"
"No."
"Is it a real number?"
"No. It isn't a number at all. It's a concept of endlessness, unreachableness.
"I knew it. See? You are just a figment of my imagination. — Amy Harmon

Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no square root; thirdly that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle is to the diameter. — Augustus De Morgan

I met a man once who told me that far from believing in the square root of minus one, he didn't believe in minus one. This is at any rate a consistent attitude. — Edward Charles Titchmarsh

If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here — Tom Lehrer

North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. — Barbara Demick

The square root of 69 is 8(ate) som' — Drake

There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity. But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity. — George Gamow

There's all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to - learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad - but I just didn't have the time. — Tom Holt

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals. — Henry Spencer

This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [ ... ] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like "unreal"? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well. — Orson Scott Card

Is the square root of hate the same thing as love times love? — Eugene Mirman

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question. — Carl Friedrich Gauss