Ian Stewart Quotes

#1. If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Ian Stewart

#2. Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it's true. Otherwise, we won't know anything at all.

Ian Stewart

#3. Most information doesn't constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that's a very different concept from information.

Ian Stewart

#4. Maxwell's equations didn't just change the world. They opened up a new one.

Ian Stewart

#5. IQ is a statistical method for quantifying specific kinds of problem-solving ability, mathematically convenient but not necessarily corresponding to a real attribute of the human brain, and not necessarily representing whatever it is that we mean by 'intelligence'.

Ian Stewart

#6. The urban myth that carrots are good for your eyesight originated in wartime disinformation, intended to stop the Nazis wondering why the British were getting so good at spotting raiding bombers.

Ian Stewart

#7. Chaos is lawless behavior governed entirely by law.

Ian Stewart

#8. Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.

Ian Stewart

#9. First is first, and second is nowhere.

Ian Stewart

#10. Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.

Ian Stewart

#11. Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss.

Ian Stewart

#12. Unless you are genuinely interested in working with someone, don't. It doesn't matter how big an expert they are, or how much grant money the project would bring in. Stay away from things that do not interest you.

Ian Stewart

#13. if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is. Good

Ian Stewart

#14. During the past fifty years, more mathematics has been created than in all previous ages put together.

Ian Stewart

#15. There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

Ian Stewart

#16. Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

Ian Stewart