Evan Esar Quotes

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.

I’m so tired... I was up all night trying to round off infinity.

Geometry, like arithmetic, requires for its logical development only a small number of simple, fundamental principles. These fundamental principles are called the axioms of geometry.

Meton (astronomer in 5th century BC): With the straight ruler I set to work To make the circle four-cornered .

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

It is, we believe, Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump Can extinguish hell.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

Geometry is the foundation of all painting.

My progress reminded me of the horses in The Whip. They raced at the limit of their speed directly toward the audience. But they raced on a treadmill which canceled out their progress.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

A songwriter's supreme challenge is being complex and simple at the same time

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

I suppose I wanted to have my cake and eat it. But then again, what were you going to do with your cake if not eat it? Frame it? Use it as a sachet in your underwear drawer?

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.

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry.

... being perpetually charmed by his familiar siren, that is, by his geometry, he neglected to eat and drink and took no care of his person; that he was often carried by force to the baths, and when there he would trace geometrical figures in the ashes of the fire, and with his finger draws lines upon his body when it was anointed with oil, being in a state of great ecstasy and divinely possessed by his science.