Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here.
Photo: foundphotosljRecently, after a Wall Street Journal article named The Yale Book of Quotations as the second-most-essential reference book for home use, I initiated a discussion about the continuing vitality of print reference books.
Now a newly published volume provides me with a splendid example of how there is still a place for print reference in the world: the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, edited by Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers and published by Princeton University Press. Because of the close link between economics and mathematics, many readers of the Freakonomics blog may find this book of interest.
The Princeton Companion to Mathematics combines a number of elements that may not be present in Wikipedia or other online sources: entries written by some of the world’s leading mathematicians, prose of real literary distinction, and beautiful design and production. All in all, a must-have reference in mathematical literacy.
For this week’s bleg, I invite suggestions of famous or compelling mathematical quotations.
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Barbie: “Math class is tough.”
Pierre de Fermat, “I have a truly marvellous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” (Or in the original Latin, for which thanks to Wikipedia: “Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.”)
Hi Fred,
I found my favorite math quote comes from a loudspeaker building book by Ray Alden who quotes Charles Darwin as saying
“A mathematician is a blind man searching a dark room for a black cat which isn’t there.”
“It was my understanding there would be no math.”
Gerald Ford (played by Chevy Chase) during 1976 presidential debate
n.b. I can’t seem to find the actual line anywhere, but it’s something to this effect. Can find a script/clip?
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are all contracted by a rancher to build the most efficient fence in which to house his stable of cattle.
The engineer builds a large round fence around the property claiming that is the most practical and efficient design.
The physicist scoffs at the engineer and starts drawing up plans for a fence that would circle the earth thus improving on the efficiency of the engineers design, however drastically reducing the practically of it.
The mathematician walks over, grabs four small segments of fence that he builds into a square around himself and says, “I declare myself to be on the outside!”
Ok, it’s not a quote, but it’s one of my favorite jokes
“If you think dogs can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then giving Fido only two of them.” -Phil Pastoret
As an undergrad at MIT I always had the following Albert Einstein quote on a poster on my wall:
“Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.”
It’s super cheesy and may be apocryphal, but just perfect for a young nerd.
From (or at least widely attributed to) good old Paul Erdos:
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”