Ally Carter Quotes

Mathematicians are fairly cheap.

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

...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

Why don't we teach sex the way we teach math or history? It is such a deeply crucial and healing part of life and we offer no road map. I think it is core to ending violence.

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

I was encouraged, though, because I saw feminist writers - male and female - calling out the bias. I feel like more and more writers are cognizant of the problems and are willing to try to challenge them.

In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem.

Q: What’s hard for you? A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.

Earlier today, President Bush said Kerry will be a tough and hard-charging opponent. That explains why Bush's nickname for Kerry is math.

But Hale wasn't just a member of her crew who had messed up. He was Hale. Her Hale. And Kat just wanted him back.

The people who are getting rich can't imagine that the world is not a better place.

I have discovered such wonderful things that I was amazed... Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.

Sometimes you feel a need to express yourself, and there is no better way than to go to places where people need everything. It's dramatic, it's tragic. You just can't understand why, in the world of today, there are still things like that. The images you see on TV kill you. Of course when you are there (at these trouble spots) you can't turn off the TV. You are face-to-face with reality.

...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.