Quotes & Sayings About Square Roots

Irrationality is the square root of all evil — Douglas Hofstadter

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

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

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

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The science of calculation also is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic equation and the use of logarithms are often of value in ordinary cases: but all beyond these is but a luxury; a delicious luxury indeed; but not be in indulged in by one who is to have a profession to follow for his subsistence. — Thomas Jefferson

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

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

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

My history has been to grow the roots as deeply as you can before going on to the next thing. That's why it took 10 years to go from Union Square Cafe to Gramercy Tavern, and another 10 years to go from Blue Smoke's first location to its second, and five to go from Shake Shack 1 to Shake Shack 2. — Danny Meyer

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

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

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

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

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

Short, square, cleanshaven, his head seemed carved out of an elephant's tusk, the whole massive cone of ivory left more or less complete in its original shape, eyes hollowed out deep in the roots, the rest of the protuberance accommodating his other features, terminating in a perfectly colossal nose that stretched directly forward from the totally bald cranium. The nose was preposterous, grotesque, slapstick, a mask from a Goldoni comedy. — Anthony Powell