Top 62 Quotes About Mathematics In Nature
#1. Philosophically, mathematics is not a part of science. Mathematics studies patterns, science studies nature
Lynn Steen
#2. [All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.
Marquis De Condorcet
#3. The Golden Number is a mathematical definition of a proportional function which all of nature obeys, whether it be a mollusk shell, the leaves of plants, the proportions of the animal body, the human skeleton, or the ages of growth in man.
R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz
#4. Mathematics are well and good but Nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
Albert Einstein
#5. Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy
your mathematics is.
Leslie Lamport
#6. The Golden Mean was considered a fundamental constant by the Egyptians and the fundamental division of the whole into two parts.
Richard Heath
#7. The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
#8. It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.
Mark Kac
#9. Reality cannot be captured by language - not even the language of mathematics - since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity.
Dee Hock
#10. We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists' attempts to describe nature.
Alexander Markovich Polyakov
#11. I knew my purpose well and clear: to show how Nature behaves without cluttering its beauty with abtruse mathematics.
Julius Sumner Miller
#12. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
Jeanette Winterson
#13. Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most.
Terence McKenna
#14. I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.
Clifford A. Pickover
#15. He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.
Alvaro De Campos
#16. The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people. And combining the two is creating this beautiful alliance between humanity and nature. That's why my forests are mathematical expansion systems, all of them.
Agnes Denes
#17. When the ancients discovered 'Phi', they were certain they had stumbled across God's building block for the world.
Dan Brown
#18. Mathematics has a threefold purpose. It must provide an instrument for the study of nature. But this is not all: it has a philosophical purpose, and, I daresay, an aesthetic purpose.
Henri Poincare
#19. And as for Mixed Mathematics, I may only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed.
Francis Bacon
#20. For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.
Brian Greene
#21. Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.
Melvin Schwartz
#22. The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
#23. Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.
John Wallis
#24. Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.
Ian Stewart
#25. The issue, then, is not, What is the best way to teach? but, What is mathematics really all about? ... Controversies about ... teaching cannot be resolved without confronting problems about the nature of mathematics.
Reuben Hersh
#26. Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence ... the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.
Hannah Arendt
#27. One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.
Galileo Galilei
#28. Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
Maria Mitchell
#29. But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.
Rene Descartes
#30. People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding.
Richard P. Feynman
#31. I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
Stephen Sondheim
#32. Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.
Charlie Munger
#33. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#34. Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.
Hermann Weyl
#35. Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
George Zebrowski
#36. One cannot understand ... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.
Richard P. Feynman
#37. To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
Richard Feynman
#38. Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.
Robert M. Pirsig
#39. In modern science laws of nature are usually phrased in mathematics. They can be either exact or approximate, but they must have been observed to hold without exception - if not universally, then at least under a stipulated set of conditions. For
Stephen Hawking
#40. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
#41. It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have arisen if it had been known from the beginning that in Nature there are no exactly straight lines, no real circle, no absolute standard of size.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#42. Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.
Hermann Weyl
#43. Nature's economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.
Carl Linnaeus
#44. Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
Edward Teller
#45. Nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world.
James Jeans
#46. One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
Henri Poincare
#47. Nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.
Bertrand Russell
#48. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.
Margaret Wertheim
#49. All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#50. In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation.
Ada Lovelace
#51. Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
Camille Paglia
#52. Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#53. It is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.
Richard Feynman
#54. Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.
Steven Pinker
#55. I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.
Baruch Spinoza
#56. I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.
Douglas Coupland
#57. A result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs.
The Nature of Mathematics
Max Black
#58. The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
Isaac Newton
#61. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve.
Ivars Peterson
#62. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos [mathematics], where pure thought can dwell in its natural home ...
Bertrand Russell
