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Quote by Norbert Wiener

“The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.”

Quote by Norbert Wiener

Author

Norbert Wiener, born on November 26, 1894, and died on March 18, 1964, was an American mathematician and a founding figure in the field of cybernetics. Known as the 'father of the information age,' Wiener made significant contributions to mathematics, physics, and engineering, particularly in the areas of stochastic processes, Fourier analysis, and control theory. more

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Book:Gone with the wind

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“Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.”

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Book:Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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“One of the big misapprehensions about mathematics that we perpetrate in our classrooms is that the teacher always seems to know the answer to any problem that is discussed. This gives students the idea that there is a book somewhere with all the right answers to all of the interesting questions, and that teachers know those answers. And if one could get hold of the book, one would have everything settled. That's so unlike the true nature of mathematics.”

“The best therapy for emotional blocks to math is the realization that the human race took centuries or millennia to see through the mist of difficulties and paradoxes which instructors now invite us to solve in a few minutes.”

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Author:Lancelot Hogben

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“Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

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Source: The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester

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Book:Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association, Exeter, August 19th, 1869

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Author:Jean le Rond d'Alembert