Explore Quotes on Mathematics

The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.

Modern economics is sick. Economics has increasingly become an intellectual game played for its own sake and not for its practical consequences for understanding the economic world. Economists have converted the subject into a sort of social mathematics in which analytical rigour is everything and practical relevance is nothing.

In my youth it was said that what was too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics.

The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

Economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems.

The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.

Lectures were once useful; but now when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary.

Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation.

The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.

As one reads mathematics, one needs to have an active mind, asking questions, forming mental connections between the current topic and other ideas from other contexts, so as to develop a sense of the structure, not just familiarity with a particular tour through the structure.

The lock-step approach of algebra, geometry, and then more algebra (but rarely any statistics) is still dominant in U. S. schools, but hardly anywhere else. This fragmented approach yields effective mathematics education not for the many but for the few primarily those who are independently motivated and who will learn under any conditions.

What humans do with the language of mathematics is to describe patterns... To grow mathematically children must be exposed to a rich variety of patterns appropriate to their own lives through which they can see variety, regularity, and interconnections.

Mathematics, in the common lay view, is a static discipline based on formulas...But outside the public view, mathematics continues to grow at a rapid rate...the guid to this growth is not calculation and formulas, but an open ended search for pattern.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

In mathematics, if a pattern occurs, we can go on to ask, Why does it occur? What does it signify? And we can find answers to these questions. In fact, for every pattern that appears, a mathematician feels he ought to know why it appears.

Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings, and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to senses tried by the present day kaleidoscope of events.

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers.