Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Deacon

Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.

Paul Dirac

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success.

Paul Dirac

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

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

Paolo Bacigalupi

At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.

Paul McCartney

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

Scott Adams

The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.

Swami Vivekananda

If the Lord wills, we shall make this Math a great centre of harmony. Our Lord is the visible embodiment of the harmony of all ideals. He will be established on earth if we keep alive that spirit of harmony here. We must see to it that people of all creeds and sects, from the Brahmana down to the Chandala, may come here and find their respective ideals manifested.

Rob Brydon

Math was a two-part exam and I once didn't go for the second part. I knew I'd done so badly on the first it was hopeless. I re-took it about four or five times. I think I eventually got it by getting the top GCSE grade.

Richard P. Feynman

The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

Richard P. Feynman

What is necessary for 'the very existence of science,' and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself. We look, and we see what we find, and we cannot say ahead of time successfully what it is going to look like. ... It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

Richard P. Feynman

A great deal more is known than has been proved.

Richard P. Feynman

To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.

Russell Hoban

More and more I'm aware that the permutations are not unlimited.

Stephen Colbert

Yeah, Silver and his math are jokes, because math has a liberal bias. After all, math is the reason Mitt Romney's tax plan doesn't add up.

Vanna Bonta

Pythagorean thought was dominated by mathematics, but it was also profoundly mystical.

Stephen Wolfram

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.

Richard Preston

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

Steven Weber

The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of peoples lives.

Richard Hamming

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

T. Harv Eker

"It's better to give than to receive." Let me put this as elegantly as possible: "What a crock!" That statement is total hogwash, and in case you haven't noticed, it's usually propagated by people and groups who want you to give and them to receive. The whole idea is ludicrous. What's better, hot or cold, big or small, left or right, in or out? Giving and receiving are two sides of the same coin. Whoever decided that it is better to give than to receive was simply bad at math. For every giver their must be a receiver, and for every receiver there must be a giver.

Rene Descartes

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

Rene Descartes

Give me extension and motion and I will construct the universe.

Rene Descartes

Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.

Rene Descartes

With me, everything turns into mathematics.

Rene Descartes

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

Thomas F. Wilson

And by the same token, I appreciate math, because I can't do math. If I have to read a map or figure out the tip on a restaurant bill, I might start to tear up a little bit.

Robert McKee

In life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

Robert Anton Wilson

I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.

Rob Marshall

I could never have been an accountant. I got a D in math.

Leo Tolstoy

Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith.

Leo Tolstoy

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.