Math Blab

A Blog for Math & Science

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“Deep in the human unconsciousness is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

— Frank Herbert, Dune

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“That’s the most exciting idea I know: that nature is simpler than it looks… perhaps in our lifetimes we may be able to tell why all of what we see in this immense universe of galaxies and particles is logically inevitable.”

— Steven Weinberg

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If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

— Ronald H. Coase

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Mathematicians don’t like math because it’s easy, they like math because they enjoy how hard it is.

— Matt Parker (paraphrased)

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function

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99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

— Carl Sagan

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If I were giving a talk on “what is mathematics,” I would already have answered you. Mathematics is looking for patterns.

— Richard Feynman

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What is Math?

Mathematics is everywhere and we all learned it at some point, but what is mathematics, really? A search on the internet will yield many different interpretations. According to Google, mathematics is “the abstract science of number, quantity, and space.” Here is a collection of how some of history’s greatest minds described mathematics.

An intellectual game “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”—David Hilbert

“Pure mathematics is the world’s best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It’s free. It can be played anywhere—Archimedes did it in a bathtub.”—Richard J. Trudeau

“Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.”—Vi Hart

“Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.”—Plato

“Mathematics is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.”—William Woods Worth

A tool for the sciences “Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.”—Paul Dirac

“Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.”—Max Tegmark

“Mathematics serves as a handmaiden for the explanation of the quantitative situations in other subjects …”—H. F. Fehr

“In order to understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”—Galileo

A search for pattern, order, and structure “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”—G. H. Hardy

“Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”—Joseph Fourier

“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”—Dean Schlicter

Logic and reasoning “All Mathematics is Symbolic Logic.”—Bertrand Russell

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” –Albert Einstein

“Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.“—Tobias Dantzig

Which do you believe best describe math?

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Life itself can be seen as an emergent property of chemistry, science as an emergent property of life, a way that life has found to know itself.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

— Carl Sagan

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Mathematics is not something done only in mathematics class but a powerful tool for living, as useful and ingrained as reading and speaking.

The Case for Quantitative Literacy 

https://www.stolaf.edu/other/ql/case.html

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Mathematics can, on the one hand, be thought of as an incredible lens through which to see the world; an important knowledge available to all, that promotes empowered young people ready to think quantitatively about their work and lives and that is equitably available to all students through study and hard work. On the other hand, mathematics can be thought of as a subject that separates children into those who can and those who cannot, and that is valuable as a sorting mechanism, allowing people to label some children as smart and others as not smart.

— Jo Boaler, Mathematical Mindsets

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As the science of abstract patterns, there is scarcely any aspect of our lives that is not affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by mathematics; for abstract patterns are the very essence of thought, of communication, of computation, of society, and of life itself.

— Keith Delvin

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The universe is written in the language of mathematics.... without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without this language, we walk around in a dark labyrinth.

— Galileo Galilei

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You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. Its the stuff we can understand. Its cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.

— John Horton Conway

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The modern physicist, like the eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting, and ever-moving components with the observer being an integral part of the system.

— Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics