Top 31 Jordan Ellenberg Quotes
#1. Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.
Jordan Ellenberg
#2. Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying "huh," but rather making a firm assertion: "I'm not sure, this is why I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am." Or even more: "I'm unsure, and you should be too.
Jordan Ellenberg
#3. I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.
Jordan Ellenberg
#4. A math teacher's least favorite thing to hear from a student is "I get the concept, but I couldn't do the problems." Though the student doesn't know it, this is shorthand for "I don't get the concept.
Jordan Ellenberg
#5. He was unsweaty, undusty, and unbloody, but he was right. He was a critic who counted.
Jordan Ellenberg
#6. A mathematician is always asking, "What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?
Jordan Ellenberg
#7. Maybe individual people seem irrational because they aren't really individuals! Each one of us is a little nation-state, doing our best to settle disputes and broker compromises between the squabbling voices that drive us.
Jordan Ellenberg
#8. This is a collaboration between a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer. It sounds like a joke, a complex analyst, a dynamical system expert, and an arithmetical algebraic geometer walk into a bar ...
Jordan Ellenberg
#9. Public opinion doesn't exist. More precisely, it exists sometimes, concerning matters about which there's a clear majority view.
Jordan Ellenberg
#10. My reading practice is one reason I mostly don't read electronically. Different books are in different rooms of my house, and one is in my backpack. Physical location tells me what book to read.
Jordan Ellenberg
#11. Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.
Jordan Ellenberg
#12. It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.
Jordan Ellenberg
#13. Mathematicians can be persnickety about logical niceties. We're the kind of people who think it's funny, when asked, "Do you want soup or salad with that?" to reply, "Yes.
Jordan Ellenberg
#14. Mathematics, mostly, is a communal enterprise, each advance the product of a huge network of minds working toward a common purpose, even if we accord special honor to the person who places the last stone in the arch.
Jordan Ellenberg
#15. There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we're still wrong about.
Jordan Ellenberg
#16. The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we'd now call mathematics, things we'd now call religion, and things we'd now call mental illness.
Jordan Ellenberg
#17. A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.
Jordan Ellenberg
#18. Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss." And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.
Jordan Ellenberg
#20. We tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules.You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don't obey them you get a C-.This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study if things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.
Jordan Ellenberg
#22. We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.
Jordan Ellenberg
#23. A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.
Jordan Ellenberg
#24. What Secrist's findings really show is that businesses are much more like the cities in Wisconsin. Superior management and business insight play a role, but so does plain luck, in equal measure.
Jordan Ellenberg
#25. Cauchy was not interested in the needs of engineers. Cauchy was interested in the truth.
Jordan Ellenberg
#26. you never miss the plane, you're spending too much time in airports.
Jordan Ellenberg
#27. we're not actually people at all, but simulations running on an ultracomputer built by other people.
Jordan Ellenberg
#28. Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.
Jordan Ellenberg
#29. Yes, the existence of human life is evidence for the existence of God; but it's much better evidence that our world was programmed by people much smarter than us.
Jordan Ellenberg
#31. Safety warning: never divide by zero unless a licensed mathematician is present.
Jordan Ellenberg
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