Quotations (12)

1 to 12 of 12 items
A young, unwed mother takes a job as a housekeeper for a brilliant professor of mathematics who only has eighty minutes of short-term memory. She reintroduces herself to him each morning, and he pins notes all over his suit to try and give…
"Someone once wrote that worrying is the hardest thing about being a parent." === "So who was it? Who discovered zero?" "An Indian mathematician; we don't know his name. The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that…
Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem. Research on ellipses made it possible to determine the orbits of the planets, and Einstein used non-Euclidean geometry to…
"I'll show you one more thing about perfect numbers," he said, swinging the branch and drawing his legs under the bench to make more room on the ground. "You can express them as the sum of consecutive natural numbers." 6 = 1 + 2 + 3; 28 =…
"The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put…
"If n is a natural number, then any prime can be expressed as either 4n + 1 or 4n - 1. It's always one or the other." "All of those numbers, those infinite primes, can all be divided into two groups?" "Take 13, for example ..." "That would…
... 28=1+2+3+4+5+6+7 ... The subtle formula for the Artin conjecture and the plain line of the factors for the number 28 blended seemlessly, surrounding us where we sat on the bench. The figures became stitches in the elaborate pattern…
203arlington
Math has proven the existence of God because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.
“The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond…
“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”
“Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths.…
“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”