Saturday 15 January 2011

Starting again... from the basics

Ok, i'll give another shot at this blogging thing... starting from the basics.  And what is more basic than Math ?  I love math and you can find it everywhere.  So here we go with a little collection of funny and / or deep math quotes about it (i can see you are relieved that i'm not going for some math lesson):

"Math is like love — a simple idea but it can get complicated." R. Drabek

"Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas' cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data." Thomas Henry Huxley
Quite a poetic explanation of the famous IT acronym GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

"1 is equal to 2 for sufficiently large values of 1." Unknown author

"There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied mathematics." Archimedes
This can be applied to most arts/sciences/technologies, and to some degree it should be that way, as we can't really know everithing, on the other hand we should know the basic principles (math again ? ;-) ) so that we'll only found those things hard, not impossible.

"If there is a God, he's a great mathematician." Paul Dirac

"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul." Sofia Kovalevskaya

"Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics." Dean Schlicter

"In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it." Georg Cantor

"A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas." Tsutung Chien

"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer." Edsger W. Dijkstra
Math, language and programming all in one sentence... bliss.

"Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game." G. H. Hardy
Oh, how was i shocked and excited the first time i've formally met that kind of demonstration and how i loved to do that in the following school years.

"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?" David Hilbert
One of the best books i've ever read, "The music of the primes" by Marcus du Sautoy is about the Riemann hypotesis, the thing i love about that book is how it speaks about the drive the matematician involved in this search have.

2 comments:

  1. Great post and happy you're back! Big hugs, my friend! :)) Lizzie

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  2. 2011! Come back!! It's 2012!! ;)

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