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Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart Quotes

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Famous Ian Stewart Quotes

“Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it's true. Otherwise, we won't know anything at all.”

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Book:Letters to a Young Mathematician
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“Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical [and physical] beauty.”

ArtTwoStatesOrderViewsBeautyHarmonyChaosMusicalVarietyMathematicalManifestationIsolationAestheticMathematicianTypicalSpectrumChaoticDeterminismDiscordPhysical BeautyPolarityOrder And Chaos
Author:Ian Stewart
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“...a major triumph of mathematical imagination: the use of visual imagery to condense a large quantity of information into a single comprehensible picture... Mathematicians are just beginning to understand these basic building blocks of change and to analyze how they combine. The methodology involved has a very different spirit from traditional modeling with differential equations: it is more like chemistry than calculus, requiring careful counterpoint between analysis and synthesis.”

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Author:Ian Stewart
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“To criticize mathematics for its abstraction is to miss the point entirely. Abstraction is what makes mathematics work. If you concentrate too closely on too limited an application of a mathematical idea, you rob the mathematician of his most important tools: analogy, generality, and simplicity. Mathematics is the ultimate in technology transfer.”

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Author:Ian Stewart
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