Math Blab

“Deep in the human unconsciousness is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

“That’s the most exciting idea I know: that nature is simpler than it looks… perhaps in our lifetimes we may be able to tell why all of what we see in this immense universe of galaxies and particles is logically inevitable.”

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

Mathematicians don’t like math because it’s easy, they like math because they enjoy how hard it is.

99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

If I were giving a talk on “what is mathematics,” I would already have answered you. Mathematics is looking for patterns.

Life itself can be seen as an emergent property of chemistry, science as an emergent property of life, a way that life has found to know itself.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Mathematics is not something done only in mathematics class but a powerful tool for living, as useful and ingrained as reading and speaking.

Mathematics can, on the one hand, be thought of as an incredible lens through which to see the world; an important knowledge available to all, that promotes empowered young people ready to think quantitatively about their work and lives and that is equitably available to all students through study and hard work. On the other hand, mathematics can be thought of as a subject that separates children into those who can and those who cannot, and that is valuable as a sorting mechanism, allowing people to label some children as smart and others as not smart.

As the science of abstract patterns, there is scarcely any aspect of our lives that is not affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by mathematics; for abstract patterns are the very essence of thought, of communication, of computation, of society, and of life itself.

The universe is written in the language of mathematics.... without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without this language, we walk around in a dark labyrinth.

You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. Its the stuff we can understand. Its cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.

The modern physicist, like the eastern mystic, has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting, and ever-moving components with the observer being an integral part of the system.