4 Quotes Tagged: Mathematics

The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.

Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain".

"I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.

For instance, in a book entitled Mathematics and the Imagination (published in 1940) the authors, Edward Kasner and James Newman, introduced a number called the "googol," which is good and large and which was promptly taken up by writers of books and articles on popular mathematics.
Personally, I think it is an awful name, but the young child of one of the authors invented it, and what could a proud father do? Thus, we are afflicted forever with that baby-talk number.

Modern theoretical mathematicians frown at this and make haughty remarks such as "But you are making the unwarranted assumption that the line is the same length when it is straight as when it was curved." I imagine the honest workman organizing the construction of the local temple, face with such an objection, would have solved matters by throwing the objector into the River Nile.