Bertrand Russell Quotes About Math
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Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
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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.
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Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man.
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Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
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Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.
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At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.
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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
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Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.
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Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
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Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
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All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
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A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.
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For a good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it seem almost like a live teacher.
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It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical significance.
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If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
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I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
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Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
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The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
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To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
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Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
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I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.
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The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
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BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.
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At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
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