Math Quotes: Unveiling the Beauty and Power of Numbers
Unleashing the Magic of Mathematics
Mathematics, with its intricate formulas, precise calculations, and profound logic, is a language that transcends cultural boundaries and offers a glimpse into the fundamental truths of the universe. It is a discipline that has fascinated and challenged humanity for centuries, unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos and providing a foundation for countless scientific and technological advancements. In this article, we delve into the world of mathematics and present a collection of quotes that celebrate its beauty, power, and profound influence on our lives.
Mathematics is more than a subject taught in classrooms; it is a way of thinking, problem-solving, and understanding the world around us. It teaches us to analyze, reason, and make sense of complex phenomena. From the elegance of geometric patterns to the precision of statistical models, mathematics unveils the underlying order that governs our universe and invites us to explore its depths with curiosity and awe.
Unveiling the Beauty: Quotes that Capture the Essence of Mathematics
From mathematicians, scientists, and individuals who have marveled at the wonders of mathematics, we gather words that illuminate its beauty, power, and practical applications. These quotes inspire us to embrace the challenges of mathematics, appreciate its elegance, and recognize its pervasive presence in our daily lives. Below, we present a collection of math quotes that celebrate the beauty and significance of this discipline, inviting us to embark on a journey of intellectual exploration.
I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You’re putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It’s got to be aesthetically pleasing; it’s got to have subtext; it’s got to convey information.
I was kind of a nerdy, geeky type. And I loved math. People teased me about it. I felt pretty much like an outcast.
I wanted to go to LaGuardia High School for acting, but my math grades weren’t high enough. So I didn’t get to go to a school that was geared toward the art that I was interested in because I wasn’t good enough at math.
I don’t like to be negative about math because it really teaches you a lot of great things. You kind of use math every day.
I didn’t mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.
This isn’t like cancer, where we don’t know the solution. Financial planning is math. We have the answers, yet it’s this huge cause of stress.
What’s great is that because math is such a universal language, really, our fans come in all shapes and sizes, all ages and genders and races and backgrounds and cultures.
I attended a high school with more than 4,000 students and met with a guidance counselor only once during my four-year stint. Despite my clear strengths in science and math, my counselor’s advice was to pursue a degree in business. A career in engineering was never encouraged nor, in fact, ever mentioned.
Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it’s all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it’s about profit, jobs and competitive advantage.
The conversation of how you do a play is my favorite conversation in the whole wide world: what a play is, why it’s different than anything else, the math of the way that human behavior has to be calibrated theatrically versus anything else.
I was very good at math and physics. And that’s all. I can’t do music, art, so there was not a lot of choice for me. I think people should go with their strength and that was my strength.
What gets lost is that half of poker is reading people. When you’re reading well and you’re making counterintuitive plays, a strictly math player will get scared and start making fewer moves, and then the person is even easier to read.
Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.
People who are looked up to in America will often say, ‘I don’t get math.’ And they’ll often say it like they’re being humble, but they seem almost proud of it because it’s acceptable to act this way.
I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all.
I’m so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
I’m the ‘Dear Abby’ of math problems. But if you understand something, shouldn’t you be able to explain it? Isn’t that the whole point?
I’m a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
Math was a two-part exam and I once didn’t go for the second part. I knew I’d done so badly on the first it was hopeless. I re-took it about four or five times. I think I eventually got it by getting the top GCSE grade.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
I have a pretty good math mind, so I can see patterns, but I don’t have a great ear. It’s like a tragedy – I can see so much more natural musical ability in so many other people.
I tell students that even if they don’t like math right now, they can use math as a brain-sharpening tool – a tool that not only builds the foundation for a great career, but that also builds self-confidence, no matter what they choose to do with their lives.
I want kids, young women, young girls especially, who oftentimes by junior high they think they can’t do math or science… I want them to know that it’s creative, it’s problem solving, and it’s for everyone.
I can’t stop biting my nails. It’s a bad habit of mine. I like anything to do with math and numbers. I know a lot of people don’t like geometry, but for me it’s fun.
The basic premise of math is about efficiency. And when you’ve got racism, sexism, and bigotry, that’s just standing in the way of efficiency in our own progress.
When I originally entered UCLA, I had planned to go for a film major, but I kept finding myself taking math classes for fun, ’cause I missed them from high school!
Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level.
I was a math and science kid in school, but I ended up going the route of writing and music in college.
You need a balance at all times. If the verse is a bit messy, you need it to be less messy right after. It needs to vary. ‘Shake It Off’ is a good example, where the math behind the drama is pretty clear.
I’m very good in math, and I’m a logical thinker. I don’t get wrapped up in things or even wrapped up in myself.
I thought about majoring in Math, Chemistry and English, but Math had the fewest requirements, so I went with it. I knew I wanted to teach, and Math was my field, so I studied Math.
I didn’t like school at all. I never liked the seven different classes system. I liked having just one, like in elementary school – less disruption. I liked history. I failed math and science and gave those teachers a hard time.
I dislike math, yet I respect and appreciate the fact that math is the language of the universe.
My daughter has a couple of those small calculators, but she never uses them. I think they’re fine if you need to double-check your figures, but people really shouldn’t let them replace basic math skills.
My brother and I were born in an Irish county called Tipperary. We were both very math- and science-inclined in high school. My dad trained as an electrical engineer, and my mom is in microbiology.
I was always a very good student, 3.98 GPA… But once I found out I only had to take math and science for two years, I didn’t take them junior or senior year. And I convinced my high school to give me actual credits for doing professional shows in Minneapolis… as work-study.
Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.
Math? Forget about it. If I add four plus eight plus six, I have to count on my fingers. I guess I’m hooked up differently.
I was an undergrad math major and a grad student in computer science. I’m hugely introverted, not atypical of math majors.
In high school, I once sang ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.
I’m not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living.
It’s such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.
My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.
The first book I ever wrote was in fourth grade and it was called ‘Billy’s Booger.’ It was an autobiographical piece about a kid who was really bad at math.
The most important thing we can do is inspire young minds and to advance the kind of science, math and technology education that will help youngsters take us to the next phase of space travel.
It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions, and they would say, ‘What were the Beatles like?’
I loved theatre and did magic, too, but I was never the best at it – there was never a teacher saying, ‘You’re great, you have to make this your career!’ I was good at science and math. I figured I’d go into science and become a dentist.
I am a Leaper: a person who – thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago – is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn’t exist three out of four years.
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
It’s fascinating to learn math and science and engineering.
Some people are great at the pure mathematical things – like Bill Gates, he’s great at math things. He loves to do puzzles. Me, I like to look at an overall landscape and try to figure out, how do you solve a problem?
I’d never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.
I originally went to school for engineering because I loved math and thought I liked science.
I have a really small puppy, Georgie, and one of my favorite things is to take her to the park and play with her. I take two classes at middle school, math and chorus, and I love walking home with her after school.
My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.
English was great because I could just write my opinion, and that was good enough. I was terrible in Math, even though I had amazing Math teachers. My favorite subject was either English or History. I had a really awesome high school education.
People who know math understand what other mortals understand, but other mortals do not understand them. This asymmetry gives them a presumption of superior ability.
Math is pretty straightforward.
The math of quantum mechanics and the math of general relativity, when they confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists and the equations don’t work.
In high school, I was selected for NASA’s Math & Science program. I’d hop on the yellow school bus and head up to Cape Canaveral.
A lot of young girls don’t realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven’t thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.
Nothing you’ll read as breaking news will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science. Textbook science has carefully phrased explanations for new students, math derived step by step, plenty of experiments as illustration, and test problems.
Not everybody wants be texting their 15-year-old asking how his math tutor was. They would rather be home looking at how the math tutor was today. But it is what it is.
I’m really good at math and history, but I suck in English.
When you take a look at the problems our country is facing, debt is No. 1. The math is downright scary and the credit markets aren’t going to keep on giving us cheap rates.
I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn’t believe they could learn math, who didn’t understand, who didn’t think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.
When deciding whether to fund and build a company, we start from basic principles and because many of the businesses and products that our companies create are a complete novelty to us, them and the market, we have to do the math.
We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
I was always good at math and science and physics.
I want to help middle-school girls stay interested in math and be good at it, and see it as friendly and accessible and not this scary thing. Everyone else in society tells them it’s not for them. It’s for nerdy white guys with pocket protectors.
Even when a man and a woman perform equally well in a task – say, solving math problems – men are more willing to enter competitions based on that task. Men also show less risk aversion.
I’m tired of being 51st in this country on the NEAP scores on fourth-grade math. We don’t have but 50 states.
Had I to do it again, I would have been a math major, probably a double major, and did take a lot of math classes, but I would have taken a lot more.
In college, you had to worry about that math class or this exam that’s coming up on Tuesday, but not in the professionals. You eat, sleep, and do everything related to your craft – and your craft is football. You can be at it from sunup to sundown.
Most of the time I liked school and got good grades. In junior high, though, I hit a stumbling block with math – I used to come home and cry because of how frustrated I was! But after a few good teachers and a lot of perseverance, I ended up loving math and even choosing it as a major when I got to college.
I obviously pursued a career in the arts but always wondered if I had just been supported a little more in math, as opposed to it being ‘a thing I had to learn,’ how that would have changed things for me.
I did not love reading, spelling, math and science. I struggled. I was a terrible speller.
What’s going on in the game today… it’s data vs. art – that’s what it comes down to for me. Art being the human heartbeat, data being numbers, the math, etc. I believe there’s a balance to be struck right there.
To solve math problems, you need to know the basic mathematics before you can start applying it.
In my own research when I’m working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I’m doing if I’m solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I’m constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind’s-eye picture.
We know that to compete for the jobs of the 21st century and thrive in a global economy, we need a growing, skilled and educated workforce, particularly in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Americans with bachelor’s degrees have half the unemployment rate of those with a high school degree.
You know the best thing about competition? There’s this whole strategy game, and when it all works out its like solving that hard math equation. You finally get the answer and you’re so happy.
People often say, ‘I like your comics, even though I don’t know enough math to get all of them,’ as if it’s some kind of club where they don’t belong. But there’s no club. There’s just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.
When you make music, you’re forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.
When I was growing up, I always knew I’d be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.
If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.
I’m an electrical engineer. Honestly, I think we have too many lawyers in Washington. Maybe we need some more engineers. They’re trained to solve problems, and we can actually do math, which is a desperately needed skill back there.
I never made a career decision based solely on my desire to be an astronaut. I attended the Naval Academy because I wanted to be a Navy pilot. I majored in math because math had always come pretty easily to me and I liked it.
One day we were sitting in our little classroom in the middle of Australia Zoo, and Dad bursts in and says, ‘OK, today we’re going to go climb a mountain,’ – the Glass House Mountains are about 20 minutes away – so we packed up all our math work and ran out the door and climbed Mount Tibrogargan.
We all studied math, but we don’t go around spewing numbers. Religion should be used in the appropriate way.
My character, Taylor McKessie, is a little bit brighter in the math and science department than I am… okay, a lot.
In middle school, I had the best math teacher I’ve ever had, and he was deaf… and I felt inspired by him. I knew from then on that I wanted to be a math teacher.
I progressed through my schooling, undergraduate and graduate degrees, excited about math and science and engineering, but really didn’t think about being an astronaut at that point. It was kind of unreachable.
Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.
I wanted to be an astronomer until I discovered I’m terrible at math.
I was always good at math and science, and I never realized that that was unusual or somehow undesirable.
Math makes sense when you apply it to projects.
My job is to analyze our data set to understand it and build products on it. I look at raw data, do the math to clean it up, and build systems to make it easy to understand.
I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.
If I had my choice, every high school would be teaching financial literacy along with math and science.
I remember doing 5th grade math when I was like seven years old. My parents just constantly pushed me, in a good way, to always demand excellence in everything that I did.
I’m very good at reading people – and very bad at math.
When I was in school, I liked math because all the problems had answers. Everything else seemed very subjective.
Yes, I was a big math and computer geek, that’s true. I was driven by the scholastic side of things. For me, it was all about what I could do with math and computers.
Diverse perspectives lead to a better outcome. There’s so much data, when you look at the math, in terms of the investor returns and the shareholder value that gets created from more diverse boards.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
Later in the fifties I got involved in kinetic studies using my long forgotten math background.
Most students who take math classes aren’t going to be mathematicians. They’re going to be engineers, statisticians – in many ways, that’s the more important mission of math education.
When something is beautiful in math, everything is just perfectly lined up, and you see through sheer thought that something really beautiful can take place.
I like math, which sounds really nerdy.
Most people who open restaurants will fail, because they lack the fundamental understanding of restaurant math. Either they think they’re superstar cooks or they think they’re superstar hosts.
I just love math and most people don’t.
I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.
To get a job as a blackjack dealer, you have to be able to count very quickly. Obviously, you need to do at least math, adding up to 21 very quickly.
The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people’s lives.
You still hear this perception that boys are good at math and girls are not, and it’s not cool and it’s not interesting. And I think we have to shift the culture. It’s so deeply entrenched in who we are.
My favorite subjects were astronomy, sociology, and gender studies. And I always loved math class; I have a thing for numbers. I played soccer freshman year and then realized I hate sweating, but looking back, I definitely should have kept up with sports.
In order to reason, you need a network to be able to bring in knowledge from several different areas, such as math, science, and philosophy, to reach reasonable conclusions on what it’s been tasked with.
In every fight, I have a spot that I could lose the first round. When do the oddsmakers ever like me? But it’s not a math equation, it’s a fight.
Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It’s the ideal teaching tool, and that’s why it’s mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without.
Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.
Comedy is like math – you can check your answer because you know you’ve gotten it right if you get a laugh. It just makes sense to me. I feel like because I’ve had to keep that tool in my box for so long, I’m ready to show it off a bit.
Some kids are good at math, some kids can run, and acting was an interest of mine. Because I knew you could do it for a living I decided, that’s what I’m going to do.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
Iraq was home of the Abbasid Caliphate, a golden age when the Muslim world was at the forefront of math, science and medicine.
I don’t wanna learn about more science and math. That’s not why I’m going to college.
Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history.
Success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture – a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics.
I was dyslexic, so math and formulas were not necessarily my strong suit.
A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.
When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you’re often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
I’m a good operator: good with food and good with math.
I was dyslexic and didn’t know it until I was 31. Couldn’t do math, spell, or tell left from right – left was the elbow that stuck out the window while I drove.
I love to go to school. My favourite subject is math, and I’m – actually, I just love high school more than anything, probably.
When I was young, I did varied after-school activities – I did art, drama, science, math. I’m not the sporty kind of person, but I did get a certificate on outdoor recreation.
Every year we go to Shirali, which is between Murudeshwar and Bhatkal. We have our roots there. The most special part of the trip is visiting the Shri Chitrapur Math.
I’m so Republican, my first name starts with ‘R.’ I’m so right-wing – well, Randy Weber. You do the math.
There is too much acceptance of people saying, ‘I am a math person, or I am an artsy person.’ It makes me cringe.
Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their ‘critical thinking.’
I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous, which is acting, and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics, and I think math is the cat’s meow.
It is the public that is illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and environmental advocacy groups that manufacture fear for misconceptions about energy.
When I was a boy, I was called a nerd all the time – because I didn’t like sports, I loved to read, I liked math and science, I thought school was really cool – and it hurt a lot. Because it’s never OK when a person makes fun of you for something you didn’t choose. You know, we don’t choose to be nerds.
I love math.
The main thing that you learn in grad school, or should learn, is how to think like an economist. The rest is just math.
Math was always hard for me, but my dad would come up with ways of making it fun. I remember playing ‘Number Munchers’ on our old Mac… That counts as math class, right?
I hope to continue to inspire our nation’s youth to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math so they, too, may reach for the stars.
As Congress battles over spending and cost cutting, it is imperative that funding for math education programs does not fall victim.
My parents read me some typical children’s books: ‘Green Eggs and Ham,’ ‘The Little Engine That Could,’ ‘Peter Rabbit.’ But I quickly developed a preference for nonfiction books about baseball and math, by the likes of Bill James and Martin Gardner.
And they’re also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics.
In school, when I got into upper-level math, there would be times when I would wake up from a dream and have – not an answer, exactly, but a direction to pursue. My writing has always been like that. I wake up from dreams knowing which direction to go in.
I remember watching Regis and Kathie Lee interview celebrities, and my mom looked so happy. I just did the math. I wanted to make my mom happy, and I wanted to talk to celebrities. Basically, I wanted Kathie Lee’s job!
Math has a lot of negative stereotypes, but it can actually be fun and incredibly empowering.
When I was in 7th grade, we were all given an exam. It was science and math, and the boys who did well were skipped ahead so that when they got to be juniors or seniors in high school they would be able to go to the local community college and take calculus and physics there. And I wasn’t skipped ahead.
Not every child learns the same way. I could not learn through my eyes. Reading was impossible. Math, to compute it in my mind, was impossible. I learned everything through listening.
It’s probably indicative that I was destined for an academic career that I’m 6-5 and I lost the slam-dunk championship to somebody 5-8. I was a lot better at math.
I’m weird: I like science and math but also like English as well.
Photography let me show other people how I saw the world. Math required me to do work that made my head hurt.
There’s a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It’s just one step after the next.
For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!
I like to study a lot of math, physics, and the Bible, too. For me, they all show that there’s a lot more to things than we see.
If I do have kids, I can’t wait because I’m excited to go back to school to help them with their homework and remember how to do simple math. I think it’s about staying curious and not losing the sense of wonder.
If you stop at general math, you’re only going to make general math money.
The Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast?
If they had rankings in baseball, maybe I would have been able to do the math and figure out my chances of being a professional baseball player versus a tennis player. But that was the decision-maker for me, I just thought I was better in tennis.
I was never good at math.
I got my mathematics degree because I wanted to teach deaf children math.
Math and reading are my only weaknesses – other than that, I’m perfect.
What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.
I would encourage anybody who’s interested in any kind of science, engineering, math field, to go after that.
The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.
I’m not good at math.
There are times when you’ll only have one or two seconds to decide if you’re going to bet on something and you need to be decisive. You need to do math quickly in your head.
Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.
While President Obama shirks his responsibility to advance solutions to our fiscal challenges, he can no longer hide from the merciless math of the balance sheet. Conservatives have made certain of that.
We need to tap the resource of current and retiring science and math professionals that have both content mastery and the practical experience to serve as effective teachers.
I lived in fear that other engineers would stop me in the street and ask me a math question, and I wouldn’t know the answer.
When people ask for book recommendations, I say this: Do some math. If you read one book every week for the rest of your life, and if you’re lucky enough to live for 50 more years, you’re only going to get to 2,600 books.
Certainly by the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I had to have a long education if I wanted to become an astronomer, but I figured I’d try it, and if I didn’t get far enough, I could always end up teaching in high school or math or physics.
People think that the arts are optional and they aren’t. They teach a level of emotional depth that’s equally important to mathematic skill. You can replace some math skills with a calculator if you know how to operate the thing, but there’s no calculator for human interaction.
The math works. Over the course of a season, there’s some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There’s so much data that you can predict: individual players’ performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off.
In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking!’ I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.
I don’t want Washington – let me be perfectly clear – I do not want Washington involved in local education decisions any more than I want them involved in common core. You know, common core was a state-created and state-implemented voluntary set of standards in Math and English that are comparable across state lines.
The thing is everything is good at the Cheesecake Factory. Everything’s good. It’s science-based. It’s a formula; there’s math. It’s all good!
I think maths is the root of everything. If we understood every area of math, it would lead to improving our sense of science, physics, engineering, space travel… all those great things. Maths is a backbone for it.
In order for America to remain a global leader in innovation and opportunity, we must give our children a solid foundation in math and science.
I’ve always loved maths, so in college when I started engineering, I had applied math and I really liked it, so I overloaded my courses and did two degrees.
I want to make everyone believe that they can understand math and science.
At Harvard I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math.
If some day you’re struggling with math, and you think, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ you can – you actually can. Everybody has their hard days – I definitely had mine – and you get through them, and you learn from that stumble, and then you’re onto the next problem.
I joke around all the time, ‘I’m Asian; I’m really good at math.’
In Philly, there are a lot of social programs. If you have a degree, you can go and apply. I was basically a social worker, but I became sort of a sub teacher in a special program, helping kids with reading or math. But we would also do plays, learn about music… We were doing lots of fun stuff, but that was such hard work.
I would hope that maybe math teachers could use ‘Prime Baby’ as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers.
When I tell people I’m a space scientist studying asteroids, they sometimes assume I’m a super-smart math whiz. The kind of person who skipped a bunch of grades and went to college when they were sixteen. Although I am good at math, school was difficult for me, and I didn’t get straight A’s.
Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
We still raise girls to look to other people for assurance they are attractive and smart, while boys are raised to determine their own value. Many girls are still made to feel it’s not feminine to be good at science or math.
Look, I’m 40, I’m single, and I work in musical theater – you do the math!
I liked math – that was my favorite subject – and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
I thought math, especially when I was younger, is something you either love or hate. I had been blessed to be able to do math and it made me like it.
A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun.
Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents’ garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they’re also practicing math.
My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada’s nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.
I’m not terribly athletic. And… there’s a lot of things I’m not good at. And if it makes anybody feel better, I was really a pretty bad math student growing up.
The things you’re passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history – the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
What skills I lacked in, say, math or science, I like to think I made up for in my ability to read people and situations with great clarity. I therefore considered myself as a sort of valued soothsayer when it came to dispensing opinions to my friends about their life choices or relationships.
Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.
My father, a math professor in Hong Kong, worked as an electrical engineer here. My mother was an art teacher, but once we came to the United States, she went back to school and became certified as a special-education teacher.
We want Florida to be first for jobs, and we must have a skilled workforce to reach that goal. By investing in science, technology, engineering and math education, we are ensuring our students are prepared for the jobs of the future. Our teachers are essential to preparing our students.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
We’ve lost something that’s been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that’s always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
9/11 did not really impact me, but I remember sitting in my 6th grade math class. I remember the teachers just being in a panic and turning on our TVs and I remember the impact in the look of just disbelief and sadness and shock that was on my teacher’s face.
You’re working with adults and you’re being paid to do a job. And you’re a kid. Then you go back to high school, and everybody’s partying, and they’re doing math. I always felt a little bit outside of it. Outside of both experiences, really.
I’m such a stereotypical female learner in that I love social studies and love literature, and I always struggled with math and science.
At the fourth grade level, girls at the same percentages of boys say they’re interested in careers in engineering or math or astrophysics, but by eighth grade that has dropped precipitously.
Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.
Overall, America’s math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have risen since the 1990s though remain disappointing when compared to the rest of the globe.
It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.
Over the years, we settled into American life and embraced it fully. But having come from a different culture, I didn’t know the boundaries of American culture. Which is that, as a girl, you didn’t play football or soccer at lunch with the boys, and to be cool, you didn’t get into math Olympiad.
At school, I wasn’t as interested in mathematics. I did OK, but at the earliest point I could stop doing math, I stopped.
You can’t litigate math.
I struggled with math and had no interest in sports.
I’m bad at math.
Commissions add up, taxes are a big drag, margin ain’t cheap. A good accountant costs money as well. The math on this one is obvious, yet investors often fail to recognize it: Keep your costs low and your turnover lower, and you will win in the end.
I couldn’t pass a senior high school math test right now, but I could probably teach intellectual property and trademark law at Harvard.
Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there’s a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or science graduates earn more than students majoring in the humanities.
Math – it’s not my best subject.
I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it’s too late by college.
During the year, our schools are busy slashing P.E. and recess to make more time for math. During the summer, we get ourselves worked into a tizzy that our children will forget their fractions.
I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it.
When I went into the seminary, I was one of those victims of New Math and had not had Algebra I and had no idea what we were doing in New Math in the ninth grade. But when I went into the seminary, they had gone the traditional route and taught first-year algebra.
There’s nothing better for my interests and talents than combining math and sports for profit.
I do not think we are ever going to be able to, for a long time, get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools, especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.
I didn’t get a Bachelor’s degree – I got a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts, which means I didn’t have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.
I did grow up with a really big interest in math and science; I liked it.
It’s estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it’s a distressing figure.
I wish that I was one of those kids who grew up saying I always wanted to be an astronaut and was really good at science and math. But that wasn’t really the case. I always liked it, but I never believed I was one of the smart kids.
There are some parts I like about school. I like math a lot, and I like physics.
I don’t think anyone can accept us being 51st in the country dealing with fourth-grade math scores and reading scores in the fourth and sixth grades that are close to the bottom. That’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable to the people of Alabama.
I was in seventh grade math class, and we had this thing called Number Sense. So, I wasn’t on the track team. Wasn’t on the football team. Wasn’t on the basketball team. I was in the Number Sense Club.
On A Beautiful Mind, there was a wall of math.
Music helps immensely with math skills, and math skills help immensely with music skills.
You know, I loved math. My mom was a math teacher.
I loved math and science. It just made sense to me. But my hatred for world history has come to bite me in the butt in my adult years. Every show I have done professionally has required me to study the world in which my characters lived.
School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn’t want to learn. Math is just the worst. To this day, I can’t concentrate on it. People always say, ‘You should have tried harder.’ But actually, I cheated a lot because I could not sit and do homework.
I think critics tend to think that comedy is freakin’ math. Like, this is the Pythagorean Theorem. They’re not sophisticated enough to know that comedy is fluid, that it evolves, and these organic evolutions are what you have to embrace.
When I came to Harvard, I was debating between math and science, and I guess I thought in the end I wanted something that could connect to the real world. I liked puzzle-solving and connections.
My best subjects were chemistry and math.
When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies – and a consequent surge in productivity.
I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.
I don’t think our music has much to do with math rock.
The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it’s very rare that you’ll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that’s the language of science.
When I got to college, I was intending to study film. But I found that my brain was feeling mushy, so I took a few math classes. I started doing really well at them, and solving equations was this, like, drug rush.
People all learn things differently, and sometimes imagination isn’t considered as useful a tool as it can be in the learning process – especially in school in subjects like math and science.
Children who attend high-quality early care and education programs before kindergarten perform better on assessments of reading and math skills and socio-emotional development. However, since early care and education programs are so expensive, low-income families face significant barriers.
Yes, I was really good in physics and in math.
I was particularly good at math and science.
I love math. I have little secret number tattoos everywhere. I design them.
There’s a new Mozart, a new Miles Davis, a new Misty Copeland, a new Matisse potentially languishing in a math class somewhere. If we fail to introduce them to art, we fail humanity.
Today, over half of China’s undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America’s undergraduates pursue these schools.
I think there really needs to be a culture change because young girls are very interested in math and science, but somewhere along the way, they veer off of that.
Fine arts education in public schools is really abysmal. The same emphasis should be put on music, theater, dance – anything creative – that’s put on math and science.
I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn’t that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.
Why don’t we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they’d also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.
Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.
If you add up all the promises any politicians makes, the math doesn’t work.
I’m always involved with the Aerospace Program and NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center. And if kids feel so inclined, they can log onto NASA and the Optimus Prime Spinoff Award, which we present every year to some of the brilliant young minds that are taking up into the academics of space, science, technology, math.
My dad said, ‘Go to college and take whatever you want.’ So, I went to the University of Miami. When I got up to the line at registration, I saw that you had to take math and history. I said, ‘There’s no way I’m taking math and history.’ And right next to it was the line for the drama department.
I loved numbers from a very young age. I feel like my mom led me there because, instead of giving me Game Boy and PlayStations and a TV, she gave me educational software on our family computer for Math and stuff.
In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.
The average actor might only be able to book six to eight guest star jobs a year – that would be high. So when you start doing the math, you can’t live on that in Los Angeles.
Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.
Spending when the math’s not there and the numbers aren’t there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it’s filled with IOUs because the government’s been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion.
When I cook with my son, I might chop vegetables and have fun with different shapes. Cooking is a way to teach kids about other things, like reading or math with all of the weights and measures. There are so many things that are part of cooking that are also very educational.
On education, in order to ensure that America remains a world leader, we must create an educated, skilled workforce in the vital areas of science, math, engineering and information technology. At the same time, we must give every student access to a college degree.
My father taught only math.
I wish I could’ve met my wife earlier. I do the math and I want 30 more years. I wish I’d started having kids earlier.
Yes, I help my kids with their homework. But I also get bored doing it. I will sit and listen to my children pontificate and discuss their ideas till the day is long because it warms my heart, but I really don’t want to do math!
Ideally, I’d love to write poems that intrigued humans across the board: literary folk and academics as well as… dog-walkers, doctors, plumbers, chefs, math professors, jugglers, etc.
There are a lot of jobs in the financial industry that do need a math major.
I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.
Republicans and Democrats can barely do what they’re supposed to do, and they sure can’t do math!
Males and females can both have a fixed mindset about math and science, but it hurts girls more because they are on the negative end of the stereotype.
I guess you could say I was kind of a nerd in high school, so I was in the upper division math courses – I embrace my inner nerd.
My initial thoughts of becoming a lawyer changed in high school as I became more attracted to math and science and began talking about being an engineer.
What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.
I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes.
When girls are asking themselves ‘Who am I?’ for the first time and they hear all this bad PR about math, they think, ‘Well, whoever I am, I’m not somebody who likes math.’
In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.
American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading, math and science. We’re even trailing France.
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
I tend to jot down moments, lines, interactions that don’t really make any sense. I try and explain these scattered notes to my close friends, and they become more and more logical. I see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve.
People in the media and press often say they’ve never been good at math. It might be that people that consider themselves creative didn’t consider themselves good at math or didn’t find math interesting at those early stages. And those creative people are disproportionately represented in those influential roles.
Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works – it’s all the same stuff; it’s just different aesthetics that we’re talking about.
I’ve taught statistics, math courses and what I’ve found is that often if you teach them algebraically the formulas, you’ll have one group of kids doing well.
The ability to perform basic math calculations is certainly an integral part of playing fundamental poker. But in tournament poker, it’s equally important to understand that survival often trumps mathematics in coin flip situations.
Widening the talent pipeline sufficiently will require a generational commitment to teaching math and science, providing technical training, and mentoring young people of all backgrounds so they understand the full range of possibilities that a career in technology affords.
We can afford all these wars; this, that, the other thing, why can’t every American have a pony? If you break it down, if you do the math, the government could afford to give you a pony. Don’t let them tell you they couldn’t, they could.
Comedy is math, music is math, and editing is, so I think those all work together.
Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school – this was in the 1960s.
I studied math, and I was terrible at it.
I thought, well, you might see curves there, but that’s just a bone – so even if I lose weight that’s not going to change anything. That’s how I look. That’s my shape. Do the math.
Colleges accept the highest sub-scores from different administrations. So if a student takes the SAT many times instead of once, she has a larger pool of scores from which to pick out the highest math, critical reading, and writing.
I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science – I was allowed to just paint all day and write.
Science and math are hard for everybody, and it’s usually not a matter or being born gifted at it or not. It’s hard work, but it can be a lot of fun!
If you do the math, films featuring women are a good investment.
My sister was brilliant: she was in the 25 top math students in the country. When she finished college, I said, ‘Spend a couple of months here in Europe. You’ll get another take on life.’ She never came – married some schmuck who made clothes for fat women on Seventh Avenue.
The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That’s a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it’s all bleakly barren.
I loved doing problems in school. I’d take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem – Fermat’s Last Theorem.
I had to keep up with my schoolwork so I could keep up my grades. That was tough to balance both being a superstar onstage but being a normal kid trying to get her math homework done.
This much I’m sure of. Chances for winning = 1 – (# of math students playing)/ (# of math students cheering). That’s a fraction.
I appreciate and enjoy mathematics and science and all that side of things. I definitely have that side of me even though I’m not by any means an expert, but I love reading about physics and math and that kind of stuff. I wish I knew more than I did. I mean, I read books written for laymen, not textbooks or anything.
I was a mathematics major and really into math.
There’s no reason to stereotype yourself. Doing math is like going to the gym – it’s a workout for your brain and it makes you smarter.
Math proficiency is the gateway to a number of incredible careers that students may never have considered.
The companies that do well are the companies that use math.
I am better at math than spelling.
The only time I saw a woman doing anything interesting – I had a math teacher who was a woman. So I decided, OK, I’ll be a math teacher.
My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.
Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it’s about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.
I was good at math, math was my thing – but I was not nearly good enough to be an astrophysicist. I was way outta my league. I realized this very quickly.
I did math in school, obviously. And I loved all my math teachers.
I grew up being that kid backstage doing my math homework and my father made sure I knew from everybody in the cast to the lighting people and to respect everyone in the theater and all the way down to the janitor. It’s a part of my childhood. It’s what I know really.
I’ve been a big astrophysics nut since I was 12. I have always had a real soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum mechanics. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school – I’m just not that good at math.
Math was always my best subject growing up.
I got a pouch at Chelsea Market in NYC that says, ‘Art Is More Important Than Math.’ It has pencils and a highlighter. I always have to sign something or highlight a script.
Kids deserve arts, and it’s just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics.
The President’s call for more math and science students is not being heeded by his party’s leaders in Congress. They are cutting over $10 billion from student aide while refusing to fully fund No Child Left Behind. Something doesn’t add up.
Music is math; music is spiritual.
In conclusion, mathematics is a language of patterns, logic, and precision that enables us to understand and navigate the complexities of the world. As we reflect on these quotes, may we embrace the beauty and power of mathematics, cultivating a sense of curiosity and appreciation for its intricate concepts and practical applications. Let us recognize the profound influence of mathematics on our lives and celebrate the remarkable achievements it has enabled throughout history.
