Keith Devlin Quotes

#1. 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 the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience.

Keith Devlin

#2. 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 cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

#4. Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle.

Keith Devlin

#5. Cardinal arithmetic will be quite important for us, so we spend some time on it. Since, however, it tends to be trivial, we shall not need to spend much of this time on proofs.

Keith Devlin

#6. Calculus works by making visible the infinitesimally small.

Keith Devlin

#7. Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.

Keith Devlin

#8. I certainly do care about measuring educational results. But what is an 'educational result?' The twinkling eyes of my students, together with their heartfelt and beautifully expressed mathematical arguments are all the results I need.

Keith Devlin

#9. The completion of a rigorous course in mathematics - it is not even necessary that the student does well in such a course - appears to be an excellent means of sharpening the mind and developing mental skills that are of general benefit.

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin