Richard Hamming Quotes

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

I was a mathematics major and really into math.

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

I got good grades in math, but I never really enjoyed it. My favorite part of math was algebra, but geometry was the worst.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

What interests me is the connection between maths and the real world.

I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

Math was always my best subject growing up.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

If a nonnegative quantity was so small that it is smaller than any given one, then it certainly could not be anything but zero. To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be. These supposed mysteries have rendered the calculus of the infinitely small quite suspect to many people. Those doubts that remain we shall thoroughly remove in the following pages, where we shall explain this calculus.

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

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

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.

There are things which seem incredible to most men who have not studied Mathematics.

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

Yes, but you need to learn your maths." "I don't need to, really. I already know how to count to a hundred. And I'm sure I'll never need ore than a hundred of anything.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.