Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!
Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.
There can be no question, however, that prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition. . .
Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
One day, when I was doing well in class and had finished my lessons, I was sitting there trying to analyze the game of tic-tac-toe. . . The teacher came along and snatched my papers on which I had been doodling. . . She did not realize that analyzing tic-tac-toe can lead into dozens of non-trivial mathematical questions.
Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external.
The mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero.
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.
The soul, considered with its Creator, is like one of those mathematical lines that may draw nearer to another for all eternity without a possibility of touching it; and can there be a thought so transporting as to consider ourselves in these perpetual approaches to Him, who is not only the standard of perfection, but of happiness?
Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
I would have private conversations with [Buckminster Fuller]. I once had an argument, for four hours, about the existence of the Mobius strip. Because he believed in the Klein Bottle, you see. And I said, "How in hell can you claim to believe in the Klein Bottle and think that the Mobius strip is dubious?" He said, "Well, it's a torus. " I don't know what he had in his mind as a mathematical background, because I don't think he got topology. Because, in other words, the Mobius strip didn't have angles in it.
The Handmaiden of the Sciences.
A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.
Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
Human beings, from a mathematical perspective, are fairly limited. Two and three dimensions, maybe five, and we're OK.
It's like a mathematical law, Grace.