Why Math Is Important Quotes & Sayings

People think that the arts are optional and they aren't. They teach a level of emotional depth that's equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there's no calculator for human interaction. — Hal Sparks

Congress is the third branch of government ... which makes every one of the 535 members of Congress 1/535th of that important one-third, which works out to, hmmm, well, someone else can do the math. You wouldn't think such little wheels could make so much noise. — Wesley Pruden

Listening to the data is important ... but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model? — Steve Lohr

Okay. Morality in a nutshell. Don't hurt people if you can avoid it. Don't steal stuff unless you're starving or it's really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don't eat anything that talks. If it doesn't fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can. — Ursula Vernon

Emotional quotient is far more important than intelligence quotient. We live with people, not with math problems. — Saru Singhal

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled this by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn't have gotten his trip funded if he'd done his math right, and he clearly wouldn't have survived if America hadn't existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right. — Max Tegmark

Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of "How was your day?" try "What did you do in math class today?" Instead of "Do you like your teacher?" ask "What do you like about your teacher?" Or "What do you not like so much?" Let her take her time to answer. Try to avoid asking, in the overly bright voice of parents everywhere, "Did you have fun in school today?!" She'll sense how important it is that the answer be yes. — Susan Cain

The degree to which the arts are included in our educational curriculum is totally inadequate. The arts are just as important as math and science in an education and just as important as any other endeavour in our lives. — Ken Danby

We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. — David Foster Wallace

The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel. — John Glenn

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Knowing you don't have much time left changes things. You get kind of philosophical. And you figure things out - more like, they figure themselves out - and everything gets real clear. Your first kiss isn't as important as your last. The math test really didn't matter. The pie really did. The stuff you're good at and the stuff you're bad at are just different parts of the same thing. Same goes for the people you love and the people you don't - and the people who love you and the people who don't. The only thing that mattered was that you cared about a few people. Life is really, really short. — Kami Garcia

It's specifically this Z = 2^(Aleph0) that he couldn't prove. Ever. Despite years of unimaginable doodling. Whether it's what unhinged him or not is an unanswerable question, but it is true that his inability to prove the C.H. caused Cantor pain for the rest of his life; he considered it his great failure. This too, in hindsight, is sad, because professional mathematicians now know exactly why G. Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the C.H. The reasons are deep and important and go corrosively to the root of axiomatic set theory's formal Consistency, in rather the same way that K. Godel's Incompleteness proofs deracinate all math as a formal system. Once again, the issues here can be only sketched or synopsized (although this time Godel is directly involved, so the whole thing is probably fleshed out in the Great Discoveries Series' Godel booklet). — David Foster Wallace

Implicit in the notion of such education as it is practiced in the United States is the concept of breadth. You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don't just learn to think; you learn that there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature. You see what philosophy means by reality, and then you see what math or physics does. Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself. — William Deresiewicz

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well - something in math - but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle. — Robert A. Heinlein

Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard. — Danica McKellar

We have 2,500 students and an 8,000-seat basketball arena. You do the math on how important basketball is in Aberdeen. — Don Meyer

To say that math is important because it is useful is like saying that children are important because we can train them to do spiritually meaningless labor in order to increase corporate profits. Or is that in fact what we are saying? — Paul Lockhart

Children need far more than basic skills in reading, writing, and math, as important as those might be. Children also need to learn how to think for themselves, how to find meaning in what they learn, and how to work and live together. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being. — Marvin Hamlisch

Learning improves in school environments where there are comprehensive music and arts programs. They increase the ability of young people to do math. They increase the ability of young people to read. And most important of all, they're a lot of fun. — William J. Clinton

This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped. — Emil Artin

There is no more important homework than reading. Research shows that the highest achieving students are those who devote leisure time to reading, even when the school day and year are only mid-length and homework isn't excessive. Recently, the largest-ever international study of reading found that the single most important predictor of academic success is the amount of time children spend reading books, more important even than economic or social status. And one of the few predictors of high achievement in math and science is the amount of time children devote to pleasure reading. — Nancie Atwell

If other people thought art was important, then it would be required to graduate. But no, I don't have to take art. I do have to take math, which is just a waste of time because the numbers get all switched up in my brain, plus, calculators exist for a reason. I do have to take history, which is basically memorizing tariff acts till your brain bleeds. I do have to take four years of gym class with a bunch of jerks who punch me if they don't like what I say. But art? Optional. Even though art and music and literature and all that are what make us human. Algebra doesn't make us human. Games don't make us human. — Laura Ruby

There are many different experiences that cause girls to relinquish their true selves. In early adolescence girls learn how important appearance is in defining social acceptability. Attractiveness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for girls' success. This is an old, old problem. Helen of Troy didn't launch a thousand ships because she was a hard worker. Juliet wasn't loved for her math ability. — Mary Pipher

In our travels, we have come across many equations
math for understanding the universe, for making music, for mapping stars, and also for tipping, which is important. Here is our favorite equation: Us plus Them equals All of Us. It is very simple math. Try it sometime. You probably won't even need a pencil. — Libba Bray

You're probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone's better at math than I am, but it's okay, I'm fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things - guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few. — Jennifer Niven

Math. It's your favorite subject. Which surprises you. Last year your teacher tried to convince you that you had a real "aptitude" for math, but all you got in the end was a B minus. The truth is you weren't even trying. But then you got low Cs and Ds in all your other classes and you weren't trying there, either, so maybe you are good at math after all.
You like it because either you're right or you're wrong. Not like social studies and definitely not like English, where you always have to explain your answers and support your opinions. With math it's right or it's wrong and you're done with it. But even that's changing, my teacher said now you have to explain how you solved the problem and support your answer, saying that having the right answer isn't as important as explaining how you got it and bam, just like that, you hate math. — Charles Benoit

MasterChef Junior for me was about working closely with these kids and getting them to reeducate their parents to understand that food is as important educationally as Math and English and it's important that we don't take it for granted. — Gordon Ramsay

Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important ... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it? — Helen Keller

They look at what's more important, like subjects to help with the SAT's, etc. They miss that music is vital. It offers a break from a stressful day of science and math and it's different. — Justin Guarini

You went to school," Lee said. "I mean, at some point. And it didn't suit you very well. They wanted to teach you things you didn't care about. Dates and math and trivia about dead presidents. They didn't teach persuasion. Your ability to persuade is the single most important determinant of your quality of life, and they didn't cover that at all. Well, we do. And we're looking for students with natural aptitude. — Max Barry

Math just wasn't my favorite. I didn't get how important math is and how it relates to real life. That's why I think I was turned off to it. Once I got down arithmetic and a little bit of algebra, I think I checked out. As I've gotten older, I think there's a lot more relation to math. English was my favorite subject. — Adam Rodriguez

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. — Andrea Kuszewsk

When we got to the Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue - again Win's full name is Windsor Horne Lockwood III, so you do the math - Dad said, "You want me to just drop you off?" Sometimes my father leaves me awestruck. Fatherhood is about balance, but how can one man do it so well, so effortlessly? Throughout my life he pushed me to excel without ever crossing the line. He reveled in my accomplishments yet never made them seem to be all that important. He loved without condition, yet he still made me want to please him. He knew, like now, when to be there, and when it was time to back off. "I'll be okay." He — Harlan Coben

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true. — John Astin