Outside observers often assume that the more complicted a piece of mathematics is, the more mathematicians admire it. Nothing could be further from t….

There can be very little of present-day science and technology that is not dependent on complex numbers in one way or another..

We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics)..

Calculus works by making visible the infinitesimally small..

The whole apparatus of the calculus takes on an entirely different form when developed for the complex numbers..

In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty y….

Sure, some [teachers] could give the standard limit definitions, but they [the students] clearly did not understand the definitions - and it would be….

Hans Rosling typically would go into the room, and he would ask the audience questions. Often they had to answer them with clickers or raising their ….

Indeed, nowadays no electrical engineer could get along without complex numbers, and neither could anyone working in aerodynamics or fluid dynamics..

I firmly believe that mathematics does not exist outside of humans. It is something we, as a species, invent..

Mathematical thinking is not the same as doing mathematics - at least not as mathematics is typically presented in our school system. School math typ….

For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instea….

Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than….

In fact, we tend to think things have been getting much worse. In fact, over the last 50 years, almost everything in the world on a global scale has ….

The linear-programming was - and is - perhaps the single most important real-life problem..

The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both….

A PhD in Mathematics is three years of guessing it wrong, plus one week of getting it right and writing a dissertation..

What makes it possible to learn advanced math fairly quickly is that the human brain is capable of learning to follow a given set of rules without un….

Though the structures and patterns of mathematics reflect the structure of, and resonate in, the human mind every bit as much as do the structures an….

Some of the justifiable critiques has been by - been so successful in telling this story, you know, there's a danger of saying, oh, well, you know, w….

I saw the first one [video with Hans Rosling ] when he did - I think it was his first one - in 2006, a TED Talk. And for the first time in my life, I….