Quotes for All
He’d met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he’d been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who’d never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they’d just practised known techniques instead … Read more
Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry … Read more
What’s clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is … Read more
We sat looking out at the ocean. There was just so much of it, and it never failed to take my breath away. Looking at the ocean gave me the same sensation I’d get staring at a sky full of stars- that I was small. Like the way a math problem reveals its undeniable truth, … Read more
I didn’t think I was good at anything, didn’t do well in school. And then in the third grade, I was going to a public school. And the teacher was putting math problems on the board. And I said to myself – it’s amazing how you can remember certain incidents at any age that made … Read more
So what should we say when children complete a task—say, math problems—quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from! Carol S. Dweck
Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems. Carl Pomerance
There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science. Carl Friedrich Gauss
The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems. C. West Churchman
In the end, climate change is a math problem. Bill McKibben