Mathematical Notation Quotes

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.

The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to Johann Bernoulli: "I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x.

I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.

The Greeks according to official history used letters for hundreds, for tens, and ones.It was extremely complicated. If you talk about Archimedes, you should use Greek letters.

The name was supposed to be 'Googol,' which is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It was before the Google spellchecker existed.

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

Magnitudes are algebraically represented by letter, men by men of letters, and so on.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.

One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.

The arithmetical symbols are written diagrams and the geometrical figures are graphic formulas.

For the sake of brevity, we will always represent this number 2.718281828459... by the letter e.

Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.

Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject.

Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.

Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.

The quantity of meaning compressed into small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid.

The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent are real.