Keith Devlin Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Like a hero in a dream, Christ came and He rescued me.

LeCrae

#3. Success doesn't just happen. It is a product of hard work, grit and ingenuity.

Ogwo David Emenike

#4. This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.

Sam Shepard

#5. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

Don DeLillo

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

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

Keith Devlin

#9. 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

#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. Every moment is a new and shocking transvaluation of all we have ever been.

T. S. Eliot

#12. 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

#13. The person who has the guts to ask themselves 'Why?' at least once a week, and be totally honest with themselves about the answer, is already twenty steps ahead of their smarter, more experienced rival.

Mark Bouris

#14. Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.

Mother Teresa

#15. Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

Meg Wolitzer

#16. The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.

Aleister Crowley

#17. 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

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

Keith Devlin

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Keith Devlin

#22. It was said that Dworkin himself had penned the Book in his saner days, and that long passages had come direct from the Unicorn. I don't know. I wasn't there. It is also said that we are descended of Dworkin and the Unicorn, which gives rise to some unusual mental images.

Roger Zelazny

#23. 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

#24. 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