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Geometry Quotes

Browse 359 quotes about Geometry.

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Geometry Quotes

“It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.”

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Book:History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition
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“Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.”

ThinkingWellsReasonUseEasyFieldsComputerToolsEssenceInstrumentsGeometryComputer ScienceGetting Started
Author:Hal Abelson
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“... geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It's not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I'm able to avoid or manipulate or process pain.”

IfsHumansAblePainCertainFoundProcessBornLinesHuman BeingsFailingEternalRelationMathematicsSymbolsAngleManipulateGeometryHuman Relations
Author:Louise Bourgeois
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“It would be foolish to give credit to Euclid for pangeometrical conceptions; the idea of geometry deifferent from the common-sense one never occurred to his mind. Yet, when he stated the fifth postulate, he stood at the parting of the ways. His subconscious prescience is astounding. There is nothing comperable to it in the whole history of science.”

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Author:George Sarton
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“John Michell's The Dimensions of Paradise is inarguably among the most important Gnostic transmissions of recent generations. With his candid, uncomplicated style, John has made widely available the visions, the laws, and the numbers held within pure geometry and which integrate earth and sky, movement and form, cosmos and mankind.”

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Author:Robert Lawlor
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“Archimedes to Eratosthenes greeting. ... certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards because their investigation by the said method did not furnish an actual demonstration. But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge.”

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Author:Archimedes
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“Geometry is of much assistance in architecture, and in particular it teaches us the use of the rule and compasses, by which especially we acquire readiness in making plans for buildings in their grounds, and rightly apply the square, the level, and the plummet. By means of optics the light in buildings can be drawn from fixed quarters of the sky. Difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of geometrical theories and methods.”

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Author:Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
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“... fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it?”

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Author:Jessie Belle Rittenhouse
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“The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.”

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Book:The Illustrated Book of Tea
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“Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less real, and we are surprised to arrive, notwithstanding a painful labour, only at a result contradicted by nature; as if after having disguised it, cut it short or altered it, a purely mechanical combination could give it back to us.”

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Author:Jean le Rond d'Alembert
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“In geometry I find certain imperfections which I hold to be the reason why this science, apart from transition into analytics, can as yet make no advance from that state in which it came to us from Euclid. As belonging to these imperfections, I consider the obscurity in the fundamental concepts of the geometrical magnitudes and in the manner and method of representing the measuring of these magnitudes, and finally the momentous gap in the theory of parallels, to fill which all efforts of mathematicians have so far been in vain.”

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Author:Nikolai Lobachevsky
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“The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics. The two relatively simple problems -- the determination of the diagonal of a square and that of the circumference of a circle -- revealed the existence of new mathematical beings for which no place could be found within the rational domain.”

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Author:David van Dantzig
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“Challenger was lost because NASA came to believe its own propaganda. The agency's deeply impacted cultural hubris had it that technology-engineering-would always triumph over random disaster if certain rules were followed. The engineers-turned-technocrats could not bring themselves to accept the psychology of machines with abandoning the core principle of their own faith: equations, geometry, and repetition-physical law, precision design, and testing-must defy chaos.”

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Book:This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age
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“The universe does not exist 'out there,' independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.”

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Author:John P. Wheeler III
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“In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.”

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Author:George Leonard
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“Any one who has stood upon a lofty summit and gazed over an inchoate tangle of deep canyons and cragged mountains, of sunlit lakelets and black expanses of forest, has become aware of a certain giddy sensation that there are no distances, no measures, simply unrelated matter rising and falling without any analogy to the banal geometry of breadth, thickness, and height.”

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Author:Bob Marshall
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“The usual struggle squeezing my bloated Citroën, absurdly named “Picasso,” in or out of any old Italian town. I should be taking a year over this and doing it on a donkey. Eventually found the road to the church of the Madonna of San Biagio, a foursquare temple sitting all alone in the plain. Sangallo's fantasy of the Doric order in honey-colored sandstone, with shell-niches, rosettes, oculi under heavy entablatures. Any one ignorant of geometry scarcely dare enter this shrine to number, measure, and weight. So clean and crisp I could eat it for breakfast.”

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Author:Joscelyn Godwin
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