#thematic

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ↗

— Godfrey Harold Hardy

#his #ideas #like #made #maker

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. ↗

— Godfrey Harold Hardy

#first #mathematics #permanent #place #test

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius. ↗

— Marston Morse

#genius #madness #mathematics #same #servant

When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring. ↗

— Farkas Bolyai

#mathematics #politics #science #thought #science

Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'what is.' Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'how to' . ↗

— Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman

#mathematics #sicp #science

...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#free-will #mathematics

Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers. ↗

— R.M. ArceJaeger

#math #mathematics #humor

Yet it is true—skin can mean a great deal. Mine means that any man may strike me in a public place and never fear the consequences. It means that my friends do not always like to be seen with me in the street. It means that no matter how many books I read, or languages I master, I will never be anything but a curiosity—like a talking pig or a mathematical horse. ↗

— Susanna Clarke

#racism #mathematics

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. ↗

— Pierre Simon De Laplace

#mathematicians #mathematics #nullity #numbers #zero

I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly! ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#humor #intelligence #mathematics #statistics #education