Quotessence
Home / Topics / Maths Quotes

Maths Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Maths.

Maths Quotes

“Rebecca Gleeson (an everyday schoolgirl on her way to school on the Monday morning eight o’clock train.) The Kingdom of Nought is a time tale legacy: accompanying her on the train Rebecca’s arch nemeses Rona Chadwick, the school bully. Rebecca a fan of poetry and fairy tales. “Tales of kindness and friendship.” She would say to herself. Rebecca was a reader of wonderful books that have a cult following. Unknown to Rebecca far away at the start of the universe dark and evil forces start to unbalance the natural order of day and night, good and evil. Weird things begin to happen as both Rebecca and Rona are transported back in time to The Kingdom of Nought to reinstate the benevolent balance within the kingdom. The adventure for the schoolgirls starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. Their meeting with the witch Sycorax is as creepy and evocative as you’d hope. The story combines mathematical realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that high-lights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth. As you open the book and turn the pages you enter a strange place out-side time with amazing creatures and spectacular landscapes. An extremely addictive story that will take you to a magical place with a most unusual conclusion.”

ChildrenKindnessFantasyWitchQuestMaths
Book:The Kingdom of Nought
Create image

“Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”

WarScienceSufferingFreedomHistoryTechnologyStrengthMadnessMurderMathematicsSlaveryKillingIllnessProsperityInsanityStatisticsManipulationFascismHolocaustEngineeringDictatorAtrocitiesIntellectualismHitlerIntellectualsWorld PowerMathsPsychopathySociopathySciencesDoomed To Repeat It
Author:Piero Scaruffi
Create image

“I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.”

ChildrenEducationLearningTeachingTravelPrimary SchoolMathsNumeracyMetacognition
Book:Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers
Create image

“Any student executes tens of elementary calculations daily. Over a lifetime, we must solve more than ten thousand multiplication problems. And yet, our arithmetic memory is at best mediocre. It takes a well-trained young adult considerable time, often more than 1 second, to solve a multiplication such as 3 × 7. Error rates average 10 to 15 percent. On the most difficult problems, such as 8 × 7 or 7 × 9, failure occurs at least once in every four attempts, often following more than 2 seconds of intense reflection.”

MathsFun Fact
Book:The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
Create image

“...in pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought.”

ScienceMathematicsHistorical MaterialismMaths
Book:Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
Create image

“Computer simulation often works fine if we assume nothing more than Newton’s laws at the atomic scale, even though we know that really we should be using quantum, not classical, mechanics at that level. But sometimes approximating the behaviour of atoms as though they were classical billiard-ball particles isn’t sufficient. We really do need to take quantum behaviour into account to accurately model chemical reactions involved in industrial catalysis or drug action, say. We can do that by solving the Schrödinger equation for the particles, but only approximately: we need to make lots of simplifications if the maths is to be tractable. But what if we had a computer that itself works by the laws of quantum mechanics? Then the sort of behaviour you’re trying to simulate is built into the very way the machine operates: it is hardwired into the fabric. This was the point Feynman made in his article. But no such machines existed. At any rate they would, as he pointed out with wry understatement, be ‘machines of a different kind’ from any computer built so far. Feynman didn’t work out the full theory of what such a machine would look like or how it would work – but he insisted that ‘if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum-mechanical’.”

PhysicsQuantum MechanicsSimulationMathsQuantum ComputingQuantum Behaviour
Book:Beyond Weird
Create image