{"quotes":[{"text":"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["christianity","danger","logic","mad","mathematicians","orthodoxy"],"id":28728,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers I.E. The ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. After 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation.[Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa].","author":"Ahmed Djebbar","tags":["calculus","fibonacci","fractions","history-of-science","mathematicians","mathematics"],"id":64500,"author_id":"Ahmed+Djebbar"},{"text":"Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.","author":"Richard P. Gabriel","tags":["mathematicians","mathematics","programmers","programming","software-engineering"],"id":64633,"author_id":"Richard+P.+Gabriel"},{"text":"The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.","author":"Gian-Carlo Rota","tags":["achievement","apex","excitement","funny","humor","joke","math","mathematical","mathematicians","mathematics","science","upset"],"id":83606,"author_id":"Gian-Carlo+Rota"},{"text":"All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.","author":"Sylvain Cappell","tags":["mathematicians","mathematics"],"id":165933,"author_id":"Sylvain+Cappell"},{"text":"Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.","author":"Bill Gaede","tags":["atheism","atheist","exist","gaede","god","mathematical-physics","mathematicians","mathematics","religion","skepticism","theist"],"id":173992,"author_id":"Bill+Gaede"},{"text":"The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.","author":"Pierre-Simon Laplace","tags":["greeks","mathematicians","mathematics","nullity","numbers","zero"],"id":242128,"author_id":"Pierre-Simon+Laplace"},{"text":"A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.","author":"Bill Gaede","tags":["gaede","general-relativity","mathematical-physics","mathematicians","mathematics","relativity","warped-space"],"id":266147,"author_id":"Bill+Gaede"},{"text":"A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can't even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.","author":"Bill Gaede","tags":["black-hole","gaede","general-relativity","mathematician","mathematicians","parallel-universe","time-dilation","time-travel","wormhole"],"id":290732,"author_id":"Bill+Gaede"},{"text":"A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.","author":"Bill Gaede","tags":["electromagnetic-wave","gaede","general-relativity","mathematical-physics","mathematician","mathematicians","mathematics","quantum-mechanics","wave-theory"],"id":355161,"author_id":"Bill+Gaede"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}