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Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Mathematician

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Famous Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

“For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.”

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Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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“I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance.”

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Book:Aims of Education
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“It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.”

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Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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“Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable.”

RealReasonCharacterPurposeLanguageWrittenParticularExpressionPaperApproachOrdinaryImportanceMarkMathematicsMethodStructurePatternsMathAccidentsFactorsInstanceMathematicalEndeavorRelativeReverseReductionVariablesAlgebraWritten Language
Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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