Mathematical Romantic Quotes

I suspect that it refers to that friend of our childhood, the prince of the old folk tale; the young man who travels for seven miles and comes to seven gates guarded by seven dragons, and passes through all sorts of perils, which are marked at once by moral heroism and mathematical symmetry. It is he who is to be exhibited in as a despot and oppressor; as a despot of elfland and an oppressor of seven-headed dragons. As he is rather a remote as well as a romantic figure, it may be a little difficult for historians to discover what were his true colours. His true colours, so far as I am concerned, are silver and gold and crimson, and all the colours of the rainbow.

The popular image of the lone (and possibly slight mad) genius-who ignores the literature and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration (enhanced, perhaps, with a liberal dash of suffering) to come up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts-is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics. We do have spectacular, deep and remarkable results and insights in this subject, of course, but they are the hard-won and cumulative achievement of years, decades, or even centuries of steady work and progress of many good and great mathematicians; the advance from one stage of understanding to the next can be highly non-trivial, and sometimes rather unexpected, but still builds upon the foundation of earlier work rather than starting totally anew....Actually, I find the reality of mathematical research today-in which progress is obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck-to be far more satisfying than the romantic image that I had as a student of mathematics being advanced primarily by the mystic inspirations of some rare breed of "geniuses.

Physicists talk about finding the “theory of everything”; well, set theory is so sweeping in its generality that it might appear to be “the theory of theories of everything.” It certainly appeared that way to the members of Bourbaki. Yet a few decades after their program got under way, the extraordinary Alexander Grothendieck came into their midst and transcended it. In doing so, he created a new style of pure mathematics that proved as fruitful as it was dizzyingly abstract. Long before his death in 2014 at the age of eighty-six in a remote hamlet in the Pyrenees, Grothendieck had come to be regarded as the greatest mathematician of the last half century. As Harris observes, he likely qualifies as the “most romantic” too: “His life story begs for fictional treatment.

our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical) have, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that Aκμ4 of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off. When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of writings whatsoever;—the want of all kind of writing will put an end to all kind of reading;—and that in time, As war begets poverty, poverty peace,5——must, in course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,—and then——we shall have all to begin over again; or, in other words, be exactly where we started. ———Happy! thrice

Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’ And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run. Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.

Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in different ways, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’ And Google will answer: ‘Well, I’ve known you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire biometric history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on and, if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with an accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships –I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability that you will be more satisfied with him in the long run. ‘Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms –which evolved tens of thousands of years ago on the African savannah –give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms –which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics –say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.

[Plato's] achievements are impaired by his hatred of the society in which he was living, and by his romantic love for the old tribal form of social life. It is this attitude which led him to formulate an untenable law of historical development, namely, the law of universal degeneration or decay. And the same attitude is also responsible for the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis. On the other hand, it was just his personal interest and his partiality which sharpened his eye and so made his achievements possible. He derived his historicist theory from the fantastic philosophical doctrine that the changing visible world is only a decaying copy of an unchanging invisible world. But this ingenious attempt to combine a historicist pessimism with an ontological optimism leads, when elaborated, to difficulties. These difficulties forced upon him the adoption of a biological naturalism, leading (together with ‘psychologism’, i.e. the theory that society depends on the ‘human nature’ of its members) to mysticism and superstition, culminating in a pseudo-rational mathematical theory of breeding. They even endangered the impressive unity of his theoretical edifice.

After the imposed visions of my parents, I spent my last moments thinking about science—an equation, to be precise: F = mv2/2d. I know it’s not possible to cheat death, but I hoped for a last-minute ingenious MacGyver moment where I could somehow improvise or find my way out of this mess. But it didn’t matter how many scientific equations—or terms like force of impact, kinetic energy, and all three of Newton’s laws of motions—swam through my useless brain at that moment. The chance of me surviving was highly unlikely—less than 5%. And none of the years I spent studying or memorizing scientific facts or mathematical equations would save me now.

Ada had inherited her father’s romantic spirit, a trait that her mother tried to temper by having her tutored in mathematics.

This one is ready to risk his scientific credibility—and his adviser’s, no matter what he says—by arguing that destiny is real.” “Destiny?” That sounded weirdly . . . romantic from a guy like Paul. “There are patterns within the dimensions,” Paul insisted, never looking up again. “Mathematical parallels. It’s plausible to hypothesize that these patterns will be reflected in events and people in each dimension. That people who have met in one quantum reality will be likely to meet in another. Certain things that happen will happen over and over, in different ways, but more often than you could explain by chance alone.” “In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.” I was joking, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.

Formalism has an austere elegance. It appeals to people like G.H. Hardy, Antonin Scalia, and me, who relish that feeling of a nice rigid theory shut tight against contradiction. But it's not easy to hold to principles like this consistently, and it's not clear it's even wise. Even Justice Scalia has occasionally conceded that when the literal words of the law seem to require an absurd judgment, the literal words have to be set aside in favor of a reasonable guess as to what Congress must have meant. In just the same way, no scientist really wants to be bound strictly by the rules of significance, no matter what they say their principles are. When you run two experiments, one testing a clinical treatment that seems theoretically promising and the other testing whether dead salmon respond emotionally to romantic photos, and both experiments succeed with p-values of .03, you don't really want to treat the two hypotheses the same. You want to approach absurd conclusions with an extra coat of skepticism, rules be damned.

But he needed to be certain before committing to something so—the word, certain, arrested his thoughts. A person can’t be absolutely certain about anything, not certainty in the sense of a mathematical proof. He wasn’t certain about Kate. He saw her, observed her, wanted to be with her. Somehow, he just knew. For reasons already set in his heart, the way he was wired, Josh knew Kate was a person he wanted in his life. She was the proof. Would it be the same way with God?