Top 97 Theorem Quotes
#1. We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form: The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.
Ronald Fisher
#2. It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.
Stanislaw Ulam
#3. You wouldn't think there was a need for a Coase Theorem, really.
Ronald Coase
#4. Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern analysis, but it may be said to furnish an indispensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics.
Lord Kelvin
#5. No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.
George Boole
#6. In mathematics, in place of characters, you have variables or unknowns. If I'm trying to plot a theorem, I try to imagine these variables interacting with each other. The boundary of their interaction is the theorem.
Manil Suri
#7. You'll often see posts about people beating the CAP theorem. They haven't. What they have done is create a system where some capabilities are CP, and some are AP. The mathematical proof behind the CAP theorem holds. Despite many attempts at school, I've learned that you don't beat math.
Sam Newman
#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. A proven theorem of game theory states that every game with complete information possesses a saddle point and therefore a solution.
Richard Arnold Epstein
#10. 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
#11. Ellison's Theorem: the further right your position, the less telling your satire. A corollary of which is that you can't lampoon anywhere near where you stand, because you'd annihilate your own troops.
Harlan Ellison
#12. What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.
G.H. Hardy
#13. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.
Carl Sandburg
#14. That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.
Sarah Vowell
#15. REJECTION MINIMIZATION THEOREM (RMT):
Think about it: boys basically, want to kiss girls. Guys want to make out. Always. Hassan aside, there's a rarely a time when a boy is thinking, Eh, I think I'd rather not kiss a girl today.
John Green
#16. The Mean Value Theorem is the midwife of calculus - not very important or glamorous by itself, but often helping to deliver other theorems that are of major significance.
Edward Mills Purcell
#17. His sense of humor was permanently replaced by the Pythagorean Theorem.
Dima Zales
#18. Bell's theorem ... proves that quantum theory requires connections that appear to resemble telepathic communication.
Gary Zukav
#19. Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means ...
Henri Poincare
#20. It gives me the same pleasure when someone else proves a good theorem as when I do it myself.
Edmund Landau
#21. When I give this talk to a physics audience, I remove the quotes from my 'Theorem'.
Brian Greene
#22. This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
#23. I think I have met nearly all the Laureates in Economics. Among the few I haven't met, I suppose I'd most like to meet Ronald Coase because of his legendary power to persuade his colleagues of the validity of the Coase Theorem.
Eric Maskin
#24. Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.
Bill Evans
#25. I want to drink the knowledge of Pythagorus's theorem.
Truth Devour
#26. The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
C.S. Lewis
#27. Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals, 123 but for Hal's synoptic purposes here it's enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a)
David Foster Wallace
#28. The three discrete invariances - reflection invariance, charge conjugation invariance, and time reversal invariance - are connected by an important theorem called the CPT theorem.
Chen-Ning Yang
#29. When people asked hilbert why he didn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem and win the Wolfskehl Prize, he said, "Why should I kill the goose that lays the golden egg?
Constance Bowman Reid
#30. The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.
Edward Abbey
#31. Before beginning [to try to prove Fermat's Last Theorem] I should have to put in three years of intensive study, and I haven't that much time to squander on a probable failure.
David Hilbert
#32. The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.
Jacob Bronowski
#33. What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?
Michel Serres
#34. Share prices follow the theorem: hope divided by fear minus greed.
Dominic Lawson
#35. Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.
Hermann Minkowski
#36. To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
Albert Camus
#37. The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem underscores how stable mathematics is through the centuries - how mathematics is one of humanity's long continuous conversations with itself.
Barry Mazur
#38. The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.
G.H. Hardy
#39. Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.
Lord Acton
#40. We decided that 'trivial' means 'proved'. So we joked with the mathematicians: We have a new theorem- that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial.
Richard P. Feynman
#41. I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.
Ronald Coase
#42. A mathematician experiments, amasses information, makes a conjecture, finds out that it does not work, gets confused and then tries to recover. A good mathematician eventually does so - and proves a theorem.
Steven G. Krantz
#43. If you hold there is a 100 percent probability that God exists, or a 0 percent probability, then under Bayes's theorem, no amount of evidence could persuade you otherwise.
Nate Silver
#44. Carnot's theorem: The most efficient heat engine is one that operates reversibly.
Don S. Lemons
#45. All I remember about the examination is that there was a question on Sturm's theorem about equations, which I could not do then and cannot do now.
Louis J. Mordell
#46. the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.
Pat Cadigan
#47. Rachel bit her lip. I hope you're right. I'm a little worried. What if someone asks what's on the next math test and I start spouting a prophecy in the middle of geometry class? The Pythagorean theorem shall be problem two ... Gods, that would be embarrassing.
Rick Riordan
#48. Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y , for some value of Y not equal to X.
John C. Baez
#49. Our offense is like the pythagorean theorem: There is no answer!
Shaquille O'Neal
#50. And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.
James Hilton
#51. MacPherson told me that my theorem can be viewed as blah blah blah Grothendieck blah blah blah, which makes it much more respectable.
Jim Propp
#52. Any good theorem should have several proofs, the more the better
Michael Atiyah
#53. But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.
James Meade
#54. Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem ...
Thomas Pynchon
#55. the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. "See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing," he said, as if he'd proved Pythagoras's theorem, the sun's central position in the solar system, the roundness of the
Abraham Verghese
#56. A reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of. []
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#57. ...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#58. I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.
Ronald Coase
#59. In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance.
Martin Gardner
#60. I smiled. Mom laughed, shaking her head. "That's the punchline? Why is that even funny?" "It's the Pythagorean theorem," said Lauren. "It's a math formula for . . . something." "Right triangles," I said, and looked pointedly at Margaret. "I told you I'd already done geometry.
Dan Wells
#61. A felicitous but unproved conjecture may be of much more consequence for mathematics than the proof of many a respectable theorem.
Atle Selberg
#62. There is no answer to the Pythagorean theorem. Well, there is an answer, but by the time you figure it out, I got 40 points, 10 rebounds and then we're planning for the parade.
Shaquille O'Neal
#63. Humanism ... is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
#64. Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.
Bill Bryson
#65. To many, mathematics is a collection of theorems. For me, mathematics is a collection of examples; a theorem is a statement about a collection of examples and the purpose of proving theorems is to classify and explain the examples ...
John B. Conway
#66. We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan Perlis
#67. Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.
Johannes Kepler
#68. Identifying a problem is the real theorem and fixing it is only a corollary.
Balan Gothandaraman
#69. In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation.
John Tukey
#70. Across the board at the office there was a belief, an unproved theorem, about Coinman's blind faith in Ratiram; that if one thought Coinman could willingly sip a cup of Botulinum if Ratiram wished so, it still underestimated the reverence that dwelt in Coinman's heart for Ratiram.
Pawan Mishra
#71. The world is anxious to admire that apex and culmination of modern mathematics: a theorem so perfectly general that no particular application of it is feasible.
George Polya
#72. A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you'll learn all about when you're older and don't care anymore.
Catherynne M Valente
#73. That is why one day I said my game will be like the Pythagorean Theorem - hard to figure out. A lot of people really don't know the Pythagorean Theory. They don't make them like me anymore. They don't want to make them like that anymore.
Shaquille O'Neal
#74. A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions
Anatol Rapoport
#75. Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.
Nate Silver
#76. In science, progress is possible. In fact, if one believes in Bayes' theorem, scientific progress is inevitable as predictions are made and as beliefs are tested and refined.
Nate Silver
#77. In that moment, the future - uncontainable by any Theorem mathematical or otherwise - stretched out before Colin: infinite and unknowable and beautiful.
John Green
#78. If a customer asks you to build a system that handles netsplits while staying consistent and available, you know that you need to either calmly explain the CAP theorem or run away (possibly by jumping through a window, for a maximal effect).
Fred Hebert
#79. I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.
Andrew Wiles
#80. The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic.
Ronald Fisher
#81. Theorem: Consider the set of all sets that have never been considered. Hey! They're all gone!! Oh, well, never mind...
David Batchelor
#82. The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.
John Green
#83. Statistical inference is really just the marriage of two concepts that we've already discussed: data and probability (with a little help from the central limit theorem).
Charles Wheelan
#84. Science is the one culture that's truly global - protons, proteins and Pythagoras's Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths, too.
Martin Rees
#85. The Limbaugh Theorem was not about me giving me credit for something. It was simply sharing with you when the light went off.
Rush Limbaugh
#86. The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.
George Polya
#88. Fourier's theorem has all the simplicity and yet more power than other familiar explanations in science. Stated simply, any complex pattern, whether in time or space, can be described as a series of overlapping sine waves of multiple frequencies and various amplitudes.
Bruce Hood
#89. But you can't prove God exists. And isn't that what all science is ultimately about? Proving theories about the universe?"
"Provability is not truth, Caro. Godel's incompleteness theorem tells us that, if we didn't already know it intuitively, which we do.
Anna Jarzab
#90. (As a rule of thumb, the sample size must be at least 30 for the central limit theorem to hold true.) This
Charles Wheelan
#91. There's no answer for my offense, just like the polythagorean theorem.
Shaquille O'Neal
#92. By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.
John Ellis
#93. Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons.
Pythagoras
#96. The future is the result of actions, and actions are the result of behavior, and behavior is the result of prediction.
David McRaney
#97. One may characterize physics as the doctrine of the repeatable, be it a succession in time or the co-existence in space. The validity of physical theorems is founded on this repeatability.
Friedrich Hund
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