#mathematics

My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history. ↗

— Lawrence R. Klein

#early #education #english #foreign #foreign languages

I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto. ↗

— Walter Kohn

#extraordinary #find #fortunate #i #mathematics

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination. ↗

— Sofia Kovalevskaya

#amount #any #arid #arithmetic #confuse

James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he's good with lower mathematics. Don't get me wrong - he's good. ↗

— Don Van Vliet

#brown #clock #correctly #get #good

In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by. ↗

— Steve Wozniak

#ever #genius #i #life #like

No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade? ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #art

In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide -- a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #art

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion—not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creation is up to; to have a break-through idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#art

So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a "poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps. ↗

— Paul Lockhart

#math #mathematics #reason #art

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either--there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds. But that said, once you have a good grounding in it,you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) ↗

— Jim Butcher

#magic #mathematics #art