The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Related quotes
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
quote by James Joseph Sylvester
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!
quote by Johnny Ball
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
quote by G.H. Hardy
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Mathematics is the most powerful tool that people have developed to investigate the world around us. But it is taught so that students do not realize this. The language of mathematics is able to describe objects, structures, properties and relationships in an unambiguous way. In this context we talk about the power of the "descriptive" of mathematics. In this way, people were able to formulate and express such assertions accurate and unambiguous knowledge.
quote by Juraj Hromkovic, translated by Marin Vlada
Submitted by Marin Vlada
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The principal aim of mathematical education is to develop certain faculties of the mind, and among these intuition is not the least precious. It is through it that the mathematical world remains in touch with the real world, and even if pure mathematics could do without it, we should still have to have recourse to it to fill up the gulf that separates the symbol from reality.
quote by Henri Poincare
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics.
quote by Simeon Poisson
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto.
quote by Walter Kohn
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
quote by David Hilbert
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It is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.
quote by Albert Einstein
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For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?
quote by Richard Courant
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
quote by Whitfield Diffie
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Mathematics is the future Latin language, mandatory for all scientists, just because mathematics allows maximum acceleration of scientific circulation.
aphorism by Grigore Moisil (1970), translated by Marin Vlada
Submitted by Marin Vlada
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RESEARCH ON RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS, LOGIC AND THEORY OF DEMONSTRATION - In 1927, the Romanian mathematician Gabriel Sudan (1899-1977), with his doctorate at David Hilbert, gave the first example of a recursive function that is not primitive recursive, before Wilhelm Ackermann ( 1928). Between 1934-1942, at the University of Iași, the mathematician Grigore C. Moisil (1906-1973) dealt with "Logic and the theory of demonstration" and aiming to "learn mathematics from the beginning", he studied at the "wonderful library" of the Mathematical Seminar in Iași, the book by Hilbert and Ackermann, but also the 3 volumes “Principia Mathematica” by Russel and Whitehead. Professor Moisil learned about Lukasiewicz's multi-valued logics in the spring of 1935, when T. Kotarbinski, a professor at the University of Warsaw, gave 3 public lectures and a short lecture at the Mathematical Seminar on Lukasiewicz's writing without parentheses. .
Marin Vlada in ROINFO Romanian Informatics 2018-2022
Submitted by Marin Vlada
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All what is correct thinking is either mathematics or feasible to be transposed in a mathematical model.
quote by Grigore Moisil (2006)
Submitted by Marin Vlada
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Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.
quote by Diana Vreeland
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.
quote by John Pople
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Elegance is not a profession, elegance is a destiny.
aphorism by Costel Zăgan (8 February 2019)
Submitted by Costel Zăgan
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Mathematics is a vast adventure in ideas; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.
Dirk Struik in A Concise History of Mathematics
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Delights of Mathematics
It seems a hundred years or more
Since I, with note-book, ink and pen,
In cap and gown, first trod the floor
Which I have often trod since then;
Yet well do I remember when
With fifty other fond fanatics,
I sought delights beyond my ken,
The deep delights of Mathematics.
I knew that two and two made four,
I felt that five times two were ten,
But, as for all profounder lore,
The robin redbreast or the wren,
The sparrow, whether cock or hen,
Knew quite as much about Quadratics,
Was less confused by x and n,
The deep delights of Mathematics.
The Asses' Bridge I passed not o'er,
I floundered in the noisome fen
Which lies behind it and before;
I wandered in the gloomy glen
Where Surds and Factors have their den.
But when I saw the pit of Statics,
I said Good-bye, Farewell, Amen!
The deep delights of Mathematics.
O Bejants! blessed, beardless men,
Who strive with Euclid in your attics,
For worlds I would not taste again
The deep delights of Mathematics.
poem by Robert Fuller Murray
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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