Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulas and words of mathematics have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure mathematics is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: “Are there no renegades to reveal the truth?” Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger.
Movie: Das Netz
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Well, it just so happens that two wrongs do make a right. Not only that, but as the number of wrongs increases, the whole thing goes up exponentially. So that while two wrongs make one right, and four wrongs make two rights, it actually takes sixteen wrongs to make three rights, and 256 wrongs to make four rights. It seems to me that anyone who is stringing together more than 256 wrongs needs counseling, not mathematics.
“Brain Droppings” page-a-day calendar
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature are mathematical pictures. It can hardly be disputed that nature and our conscious mathematical minds work according to the same laws.
For some reason, your picture reminds of a friend who used to tell girls “on a scale from the square root of two to pi, you rate an e”.
naelyn /
art, existence, life, mathematics, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, science
#314
Mathematics, philosophy, religion, psychology, mysticism, science, art (and the other means of communication), all translate life and existence into their own comprehensible language, but a translation never captures the true essence of what it seeks to translate. Remember that and life can speak without words.
The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures.
Number is the within of all things.
Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.
The number you have dialed is imaginary. Rotate phone 90 degrees and try again.
Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
Book: “Life, the Universe, and Everything” by Douglas Adams
The straightest point between two distances is a short line.
The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
Book: “Metaphysica” by Aristotle
Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
Chaos involves shapes which are almost invariably fractal.
Take from all things their number and all shall perish.
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
on the famous mathematician Ramanujan