Maths Formulas Quotes

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely.

It's not the way they taught us. They didn't know the formula for love. One plus one actually equals one. 1+1=1.

Life is a linear equation in which you can't cross multiply! If you think you can do it, you can do it. If you think you can't do it, you can't do it. It's a simple formula!

Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.

I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn't hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story

Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. & just as all hands are basically the same - form follows function - all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.

I was forced to confront the ugly truth: people had deliberately wielded formulas to impress rather than clarify.

A feeling rose inside him, making him queasy, as though an elaborate formula he’d thought was perfect was now giving false results because of an unpredictable variable.

math is about ideas — formulas are just a way to express them.

You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. This truth was once beautifully conveyed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his interpretation of a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. “This is a table,” “This is a window,” “This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning.” And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads “The name of our village is Macondo,” and the larger one reads “God exists.” The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life—the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone number of the first house we lived in when we got married—and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost.

Ode to Algebra Thrust into this dingy classroom we die like lampless moths locked into the desolation of fluorescent lights and metal desks. Ten minutes until the bell rings. What use is the quadratic formula in our daily lives? Can we use it to unlock the secrets in the hearts of those we love? Five minutes until the bell rings. Cruel Algebra teacher, won't you let us go?

The old, been-around-forever, profitless formula is: Sales – Expenses = Profit The new, Profit First Formula is: Sales – Profit = Expenses The math in both formulas is the same. Logically, nothing has changed. But Profit First speaks to human behavior—it accounts for the regular Joes of the world, like me,

I don't see how it's doing society any good to have it's members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them.

If you’d like to see how to apply these ideas directly to memorizing formulas, try out the SkillsToolbox .com website for a list of easy-to-remember visuals for mathematical symbols.7

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?

I’d never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Being surrounded by great people isn't a fluke. It's almost like solving a math problem, finding variables, adding and subtracting to figure out a formula that works. Being surrounded by people who fuel you is intentional.

I've always been good at math. It's straightforward, black-and-white, right and wrong. Equations. Da thought of people as books to be read, but I've always thought of them more as formulas—full of variables, but always the sum of their parts. That's what their noise is, really: all of a person's components layered messily over one another. Thought and feeling and memory and all of it unorganized, until a person dies. Then it all gets compiled, straightened out into this linear thing, and you see exactly what the various parts add up to. What they equal.

A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. And just as all hands are basically the same—form follows function—all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.

I know you think the whole world is held together by some math formula.” His voice has an unaccustomed annoyance in it. “But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.

Biot, who assisted Laplace in revising it [The Mécanique Céleste] for the press, says that Laplace himself was frequently unable to recover the details in the chain of reasoning, and if satisfied that the conclusions were correct, he was content to insert the constantly recurring formula, 'Il est àisé avoir' [it is easy to see].

Math is poetry, kid,” she growled. “Math is sex in the head. All that work of making your mind stroke the numbers? It’s a natural series of touches you already know by instinct. Once you get over your inhibitions, you can sit in class or lie in bed and practice formulae and sums, caress the equation till you find the climax of an elegant solution.

Tengo has an innate knack for precision in all realms, including correct punctuation and discovering the simplest possible formula necessary to solve a math problem.

... surrounded by stacks of dusty, incomprehensible books with huge formulas inset artistically on the page like poems.

But back then, at least for me, I didn't have that equation. And if you don't even realize that there's a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer?

By leaving cost out of the formula, it was as if U.S. News had handed college presidents a gilded checkbook. They had a commandment to maximize performance in fifteen areas, and keeping costs low wasn’t one of them.

School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals, but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student’s doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).

I almost didn't get an A in math, but then Mr. Carlo told me to stop asking "why?" all the time and just follow the formulas. So, I did. Now, I get perfect scores on all my tests. I just wish I knew what the formulas did. I honestly have no idea.

I almost didn’t get an A in math, but then Mr. Carlo told me to stop asking “why?” all the time and just follow the formulas. So, I did. Now, I get perfect scores on all my tests. I just wish I knew what the formulas did. I honestly have no idea.

The reality is that most of us grow up strapped in an educational system that favors obedience over independent thinking. We’re rewarded for trusting authority, and punished for challenging it. We focus on memorizing the stuff other people came up with—formulas in math, grammar rules in English, theories in physics, cell functions in biology—rather than grasping the logic behind our most important breakthroughs and tracing the footsteps of their discovery. We answer test questions with what we think our teacher wants to hear. We chase grades instead of knowledge. And worst of all, we leave the classroom woefully unequipped with the thinking skills that matter most: how to balance open-mindedness with skepticism, how to identify bias, and how to challenge assumptions—including our own—in a way that’s truly objective.

I smiled. Mom laughed, shaking her head. “That’s the punchline? Why is that even funny?” “It’s the Pythagorean theorem,” said Lauren. “It’s a math formula for . . . something.” “Right triangles,” I said, and looked pointedly at Margaret. “I told you I’d already done geometry.

What if the formula “more stuff equals more happiness” is bad math? What if more stuff often just equals more stress? More hours at the office, more debt, more years working in a job I don’t feel called to, more time wasted cleaning and maintaining and fixing and playing with and organizing and reorganizing and updating all that junk I don’t even need. What if more stuff actually equals less of what matters most? Less time. Less financial freedom. Less generosity, which according to Jesus is where the real joy is. Less peace, as I hurry my way through the mall parking lot. Less focus on what life is actually about. Less mental real estate for creativity. Less relationships. Less margin. Less prayer. Less of what I actually ache for? What if I were to reject my culture’s messaging as a half-truth at best, if not a full-on lie, and live into another message? Another gospel?

There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.

The remaining integer is either 6, 7, 8 or 9. It is more likely to be 8 or 9. The number of continents was either 68 or 76 and a half. Can you guess the equation? What is the formula for calculating the last integer, the continent one? I bet you don’t know unless you are skilled in maths. Fine. Here’s the answer. 68 divided by 8.5 is 8, and 76.5 divided by 8.5 is 9.

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. While our perception of the physical world can always be distorted, our perception of mathematical truths can’t be. They are objective, persistent, necessary truths. A mathematical formula or theorem means the same thing to anyone anywhere – no matter what gender, religion, or skin color; it will mean the same thing to anyone a thousand years from now. And what’s also amazing is that we own all of them. No one can patent a mathematical formula, it’s ours to share. There is nothing in this world that is so deep and exquisite and yet so readily available to all. That such a reservoir of knowledge really exists is nearly unbelievable. It’s too precious to be given away to the “initiated few.” It belongs to all of us.

Yes, in Math City: 2 + 2 + him (her) = 5 not 4. And again yes: A stupid man + 5 stupid women + him (her) = 7 stupid or A stupid woman + 5 stupid men + him (her) = 7 stupid. Professor Six discovered this formula when he was studying about businessman. He saw that a businessman buys 3 apple, but the businessman sales 3 apple + his own benefit which is = 4 apple. Yes, Professor Six announced: "Businessman means "Business" + "Man" = Business + Him = 2

You see... the cave is a metaphor, a tool, an illustration. The formula for its accurate representation is something like S2=(2^2)+1. As I just pasted that formula into this document I realized I do not speak math and therefore could not read that formula aloud were I ever in a situation like a reading where I would need to say the formula out loud. I don't know what S means or what S2 equals, nor do I know how to pronounce that little upside-down V between the pair of 2s. If you speak math, then you know what it means.

Even as our world is being daily transformed by breathtaking innovations in science and technology, many people continue to imagine that math and science are mostly a matter of memorizing formulas to get “the right answer.” Even engineering, which is in fact the process of creating something from scratch or putting things together in novel and non-self-evident ways, is perplexingly viewed as a mechanical or rote subject. This viewpoint, frankly, could only be held by people who never truly learned math or science, who are stubbornly installed on one side of the so-called Two Culture divide. The truth is that anything significant that happens in math, science, or engineering is the result of heightened intuition and creativity. This is art by another name, and it’s something that tests are not very good at identifying or measuring. The skills and knowledge that tests can measure are merely warm-up exercises.

Our two taco specials get shoved up on the serving counter, crispy, cheesy goodness in brown plastic baskets lined with parchment paper, sour cream and guacamole exactly where they should be. On the side. There is a perfect ratio of sour cream, guac, and salsa on a shredded chicken tostada. No one can make it happen for you. Many restaurants have tried. All have failed. Only the mouth knows its own pleasure, and calibration like Taco Heaven cannot be mass produced. It simply cannot. Taco Heaven is a sensory explosion of flavor that defies logic. First, you have to eye the amount of spiced meat, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and tomatillos. You must consider the size and crispiness of the shells. Some people–I call them blasphemers–like soft tacos. I am sitting across from Exhibit A. We won’t talk about soft tacos. They don’t make it to Taco Heaven. People who eat soft tacos live in Taco Purgatory, never fully understanding their moral failings, repeating the same mistakes again and again for all eternity. Like Perky and dating. Once you inventory your meat, lettuce, tomato, and shell quality, the real construction begins. Making your way to Taco Heaven is like a mechanical engineer building a bridge in your mouth. Measurements must be exact. Payloads are all about formulas and precision. One miscalculation and it all fails. Taco Death is worse than Taco Purgatory, because the only reason for Taco Death is miscalculation. And that’s all on you. “Oh, God,” Fiona groans through a mouthful of abomination. “You’re doing it, aren’t you?” “Doing what?” I ask primly, knowing damn well what she’s talking about. “You treat eating tacos like you’re the star of some Mythbusters show.” “Do not.” “Do too.” “Even if I do–and I am notconceding the point–it would be a worthwhile venture.” “You are as weird about your tacos as Perky is about her coffee.” “Take it back! I am not that weird.” “You are.” “Am not.” “This is why Perky and I swore we would never come here with you again.” Fiona grabs my guacamole and smears the rounded scoop all over the outside of her soft taco. I shriek. “How can you do that?” I gasp, the murder of the perfect ratio a painful, almost palpable blow. The mashed avocado has a death rattle that rings in my ears. Smug, tight lips give me a grimace. “See? A normal person would shout, ‘Hey! That’s mine!’ but you’re more offended that I’ve desecrated my inferior taco wrapping with the wrong amount of guac.” “Because it’s wrong.” “You should have gone to MIT, Mal. You need a job that involves nothing but pure math for the sake of calculating stupid shit no one else cares about.” “So glad to know that a preschool teacher holds such high regard for math,” I snark back. And MIT didn’t give me the kind of merit aid package I got from Brown, I don’t add. “Was that supposed to sting?” She takes the rest of my guacamole, grabs a spoon, and starts eating it straight out of the little white paper scoop container thing. “How can you do that? It’s like people who dip their french fries in mayonnaise.” I shudder, standing to get in line to buy more guac. “I dip my french fries in mayo!” “More evidence of your madness, Fi. Get help now. It may not be too late.” I stick my finger in her face. “And by the way, you and Perky talk about my taco habits behind my back? Some friends!” I hmph and turn toward the counter.

And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that math- ematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacri ces his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to nd it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be noth- ing for him to look for. When workmen have nished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and there is oc- cupation for a week. But where can man go? Anyway, one can observe a certain awkwardness about him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is a er all, something insu erable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo bar- ring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes ve is sometimes a very charming thing too. And why are you so rmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Notes from the Underground Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of su ering? Perhaps su ering is just as great a bene t to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraor- dinarily, passionately, in love with su ering, and that is a fact. ere is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for su ering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaran- teed to me when necessary. Su ering would be out of place in vaudevilles, for instance; I know that. In the ‘Palace of Crystal’ it is unthinkable; su ering means doubt, negation, and what would be the good of a ‘palace of crystal’ if there could be any doubt about it? And yet I think man will never renounce real su ering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, su ering is the sole origin of consciousness. ough I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the great- est misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for in- stance, is in nitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing le to do or to understand. ere will be nothing le but to bottle up your ve senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least og yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

This solution is incorrect, Miss Walker." I looked down at the formula and went back over it carefully. "No, sir. I believe that this is the correct answer. I'm sure I got it right." "No. It's wrong." "Could you tell me why?" "Because a mongoose doesn't mate with a chicken." "What? I'm sorry. I don't understand what that has to do with math." "Exactly. Perhaps you haven't been working hard enough. Maybe you got too many A's and not enough F's. Everyone in this class knows that a mongoose doesn't mate with a chicken." I looked around at the class. All the desks were occupied with... chickens. They all looked at me with beady red eyes and sharp yellow beaks, laughing their fool chicken heads off. Oh god, I was being mocked by a roomful of chickens who knew how to do math better than I did. "But they're all chickens. Of course, they would know the answer." "That's right, and you're not a chicken." "But I could be a chicken. I could study more, work harder." "I'm afraid not. Do you know what happens to you in this class if you get the problem wrong? If you don't measure up?" "No, sir." "It's the stewpot. We don't tolerate stupid chickens in here." "But...but I'm not a chicken." "No? Then you're just plain stupid." "No!" I cried. "I'll try harder. I'll be as good as I can." "I'll be the perfect chicken," I murmured, tossing and turning, kicking at the bed sheets. A pillow sailed across the room and struck me right in the head, drawing me out of that fitful dream. "Aubree, you're having the chicken dream again. If you don't shut up, I'm going to yank out all your feathers," Ashley grumbled.

One might think that math aptitude would apply across the code-writing world, but this was not so. The logical operations of a computer, while abstract, were abstract in a familiar way. When computers added two numbers together, for instance, they did so in much the same way as people do: One plus one equals two. A computer performed this addition faster than a person, but the route to the answer was the same. This was not so with graphics. When an ordinary person (as opposed to a civil engineer) wanted to draw a circle, he did not apply a special algorithm to his choice of a diameter. He just drew a circle with his hand. Having no hands, computers drew circles—and all the other shapes—by applying mathematical formulas. The better the formulas, the more accurate and versatile the shapes.

Math is made for idiots, here is what is the proccess in math class. The teacher show you few exercises, show you the formula, show you the way, say everything about the exercises and then she tell you to solve problems. So as for me the proccess is REPEAT!

When it comes to our own well being, it is not a matter of doing the math, it is a matter of choosing the formula. When you add up the numbers, keep the primary factors in mind. Then multiply all sums by a positive outlook. The numbers will inevitably change and so will any undesirable equivalence. The math is merely the meter for the moment in an ever changing flux of the dynamic human equation.

Voyager, man. Remember? The space ships we sent out to explore the Universe back in 1977? They put some gold records in the capsules, in case there’s intelligent life out there. Sound recordings and stuff. And pictures of what we look like, you know, I think they put Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on it, and some math formulas. Even if they can’t figure out anything else, the math has to be universal.” Daniel had forgotten about this, but now he remembered. There was even more on the phonograph records than Owen was babbling about. As he recalled, they contained information about topics such as our location in the solar system, mathematical definitions, the physical unit definitions we use, our solar system parameters, chemical definitions, our DNA structure, diagrams of male and female human anatomy and cell division, a diagram of conception, a fetus development diagram and much more. And, if he remembered correctly, it was meant not only for intelligent extra-terrestrials, but for future humans as well, should it come back to Earth in the distant future.

It doesn’t seem to make sense in our eyes. To us, certain sins, like murder and adultery, seem “bigger.” While “smaller” sins like anger and lust, many times go unnoticed. But, in Jesus’ math, every sin, no matter how little or how big it seems in our eyes, will keep us from him. Or in other words, will “set off the alarm” in heaven one day unless we are cleansed by the blood of Jesus.

Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos.

France had recently switched to the metric system of measurement. This gave scientists a much-needed standardized system to measure and compare results, but it also required a whole new set of calculating tables. The sheer number of calculations was beyond what could be accomplished by all the mathematicians in France, so Riche established calculating 'factories' to manufacture logarithms the same way workers manufactured mercantile goods. Each factory employed between 60 and 80 human 'computers.' But they weren’t trained mathematicians; they were mostly out-of-work hairdressers who had found their skill at constructing elaborate pompadours for aristocrats much less in demand after so many former clients lost their heads at the height of the French Revolution. Riche had hit upon a rote system of compiling results based on a set of given values and formulas, and the workers just cranked out the answers in what must have been the world’s first mathematical assembly line. Babbage figured that if an army of untrained hairdressers could make the calculations, so could a computing 'engine.

তত্ত্বগুলো গাণিতিক সূত্রের মতো। সূত্রগুলো যেমন অংকের সমাধানে সাহায্য করে, তেমনি তত্ত্বগুলো গবেষণায় আমাদের বিষয়বস্তু প্রতিষ্ঠায় সাহায্য করে!

The universe is alive. Rules and equations aren’t dead... they’re the formulae for life itself. They are Platonic Forms of Life. Monads – the basic constituents of living mathematics – are living, self-solving, self-optimising minds. Life is breathed into math because math is inherently alive. Of course, you have to be an idealist, not a materialist, to understand this.

The commonplace idea that math is a manmade language is comically dumb. We know what manmade languages are like: English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, and so on. None of these has any resemblance whatsoever to math. How can a human being invent π or e? How can a human pluck Euler’s Formula out of nothing? The reason why people are so keen to say that math is manmade is because if they’re wrong then the converse is true: man is mathmade! That is, of course, exactly the position of ontological mathematics, and it represents the highest possible wisdom

What’s different here is the focus on the proxy when far more relevant data is available. I cannot imagine a more meaningful piece of data for auto insurers than a drunk driving record. It is evidence of risk in precisely the domain they’re attempting to predict. It’s far better than other proxies they consider, such as a high school student’s grade point average. Yet it can count far less in their formula than a score drawn from financial data thrown together on a credit report (which, as we’ve seen, is sometimes erroneous).

Why do things happen the way they do? Is there some kind of order in all this chaos that we just don't see, or is it all, as the mathematically minded people would like us to believe, just random coincidence? If you put one hundred apes in a room, they'll tell you, with one hundred typewriters, and given an infinite amount of time and bananas, one of them would eventually churn out the complete Oxford dictionary. It's all statistical math and probability. The odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of getting struck by lightning, but someone wins, don't they? And people get hit by lightning disturbingly more often that you would think. Their point is, eventually all things happen. No matter how philosophically unprejudiced you are, you can't argue with statistical probabilities. But you can certainly give the mathematicians some substantial cud to chew on, can't you? For instance, sure, everything may be eventual from a statistical point of view, but what happens to the formula if you plug in when a particular thing happens? The fortuitousness of the timing? Or combine a particular coincidence with other seemingly non-related coincidences that might have occurred within the same general time frame? We've all had it happen. It's one of our favorite phrases: "Why me? Why now?" Well, when you take the "when" into account, all kinds of very interesting and un-mathematical things begins to happen. The coincidence becomes too coincidental to be a coincidence.

They say that the biggest opportunities are often outside of most people’s comfort zones. The juiciest market returns are where very few are willing to go. Momentum investing is the ultimate contrarian approach. How many investors would venture to buy a stock that is already up 50% in the past six months? Psychologically, it is a lot harder to buy in this situation than to sell, isn’t it?   How ridiculous does it sound that stocks that went up 50% in the past six months are likely to outperform in the next six months? Stock picking cannot be that easy, right? There has to be some complicated formula that takes into account hundreds of different criteria in order to have a chance at outperforming the market. Sometimes the most effective methods are the simplest. Most people stay away from them exactly because they seem too simple to work. There is nothing magic about using past performance to select future winners. It is all about simple math.   What

I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with math. I don’t like numbers for the sake of numbers. I am not impressed by fancy formulas that have no real-world application. I particularly disliked high school calculus for the simple reason that no one ever bothered to tell me why I needed to learn it. What is the area beneath a parabola? Who cares?

But just what are imaginary numbers, you may now be asking yourself, and what on earth could it mean to raise e to an imaginary-number power? This chapter concerns mathematicians' long struggle to answer the first of these two questions. Later we'll take up the second one , which inspired Euler to devise the most radical expansion of the concept of exponents in math history. At this point, suffice it to say that affixing an imaginary exponent to a number has a dramatic effect on it-something lime what happens to a frog when it's tapped by a standard-issue magic wand.

Euler's general equation stands out because it forged a fundamental link between different areas of math, and because of its versatility in applied mathematics. After Euler's time it came to be regarded as a cornerstone in "complex analysis," a fertile branch of mathematics concerned with functions whose variables stand for complex numbers.

They were more a new set of ways of looking at the universe, supported by the math, than a set of complex mathematical formulas.

Focus on the next step, not the next thousand steps. Use your willpower to move your attention away from the overwhelming aspects of a project and narrow it down to the next actionable task you can get started on. Lower your perfectionistic standards. Decrease your initial resistance to getting started by lowering your standards. For example, aim to meditate for one minute, not 20 minutes. Follow the two-minute rule. If a task takes less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately. Set an implementation intention. Use the formula, “If situation X arises, then I will perform response Y.” A common example: “If I get home after work, then I’ll immediately start studying for my upcoming math exam.” Focus on the process, not the outcome. Set a timer for 20 to 30 minutes and focus on the process of working on a dreaded task for that predetermined amount of time.

How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence? The number of potential variations boggled the mind. So much so that shortly after arriving at St. Paul’s, Woolly had gone to his math teacher, Mr. Kehlenbeck, and asked him if one had a sentence with ten words and each word could be substituted with ten other words, then how many sentences could there be? And without a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Kehlenbeck had gone to the chalkboard, scratched out a formula, and done a few quick calculations to prove incontrovertibly that the answer to Woolly’s question was ten billion. Well, when confronted with a revelation like that, how was one to even begin writing an

I narrowed my eyes. I couldn't understand anything. Has math changed since I graduated from high school? These weird alien symbols look nothing like math to me. “Sorry...I can't help you with this...” “Ehhhh? I thought you studied this before!” “That was ten years ago. After high school everybody forgets this stuff.” “And you went to university too!” “After high school no one ever uses these weird formulas. In university most students never touch math again, unless it is part of their major.

Ari turned to me and smirked, her cheekbones glinting in the LA twilight. She was all angles, a perfect math formula.

Suppose every life was written as a storybook; assuming this was true, the only storybook each person would completely know is their own. I know my own story, as I own my own thoughts and my own consciousness. Hence, I have not finished reading the books of other lives, because I am still writing my own. Therefore, since I live in and am the main character of my own book, I appear to be at the center of life itself. From my vantage point, I’m at the center of the world—I have not finished the stories of others, because I’m at the center of my own. This is why I compare myself to the midpoint formula: the midpoint does not begin a line nor end the line, but rather becomes a part of it—from an individualistic vantage point, I am a part of or even at the center of life itself.

And the machine felt nothing. As far as it was concerned, the whole world was a math problem. A formula pitting revenue vs. costs. It plugged the numbers in for the variables and went with the cost-effective plan. If it were more profitable to dump toxic sludge into the ground and pay the EPA fines later, so be it. If it were a better deal to spend $3 million to lobby congress so they could bend the law in the company’s favor, the machine paid up. If it cost too much to recall the faulty accelerators, it left them and settled with the families of the dead out of court. The costs to the environment, the human costs, these things did not compute, did not matter. Just the raw dollars, please, the only things that possessed real value in our society. This was business. This was America.

satisfaction is possible—just not with the old formulas. We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.

The key point is that, in principle, interest income is the change in price associated with the passage of time. Capital gains and losses are the changes in price related to changes in value—for bonds that means a change in the yield. We'll see in Chapter 4 when we get into bond taxation how well these economic principles hold up in practice.

When I went in the secret chamber, Thor was indeed there. A small room, the walls are entirely covered with loose slips of paper with math formulas on them, along with dirty napkins pinned up with quickly jotted math theorems on them from whichever restaurant Thor was at when his epiphanies occurred to him. The internal workings of Thor’s mind are on display on those walls.

There are C(n, k) ways to distribute a given event k-times in a string of n events. Hence, and now comes the grand moment, the probability that a certain event, occurring with the probability p, occurs k times within n trials is thus: P = C(n, k) · pk · (1-p)n-k And that! Ladies and gentleman, is the formula for the binomial distribution in all its glory. If

As Denise Pope outlined in “Doing School,” kids today have tremendous pressure to simply get the work done—to “do school”—rather than to learn. They learn to do tasks, to produce every element the teacher wants to see in a five-paragraph essay, or to memorize every term in bio and every formula in math. They think their next task is to get into certain schools in order to be a success in life, and this mind-set often then extends to career and professional pursuits. I

For example, one time we were putting some numbers into a formula, and got to 48 squared. I reach for the Marchant calculator, and he says, “That’s 2,300.” I begin to push the buttons, and he says, “If you want it exactly, it’s 2,304.” The machine says 2,304. “Gee! That’s pretty remarkable!” I say. “Don’t you know how to square numbers near 50?” he says. “You square 50—that’s 2,500—and subtract 100 times the difference of your number from 50 (in this case it’s 2), so you have 2,300. If you want the correction, square the difference and add it on. That makes 2,304.

Certainly she can't and won't measure what is measureless, what neither terminates nor repeats, what is beyond even the transcendental of π - though HE doesn't think so - what is beyond polynomials and quadratic formulas, beyond the rational and irrational, the humanist and the logical, beyond the minds of the Cantors and the Dedekinds, the Renaissance philosophers and the Indian Tantrists, what falls instead into the realm of gods and kinds, of myth, of dawn of man, of the mystery of mankind - that there is a space inside her designed solely for him and despite clear Euclidian impossibilities not only does everything, in plenary excess, cleave like it's meant to, but it makes her feel what math cannot explain, what science cannot explain. What nothing can explain.

Now, as traditional computing programs are displaced by the operation of AI algorithms, requirements are once again shifting. Machine learning demands the rapid-fire execution of complex mathematical formulas, something for which neither Intel’s nor Qualcomm’s chips are built. Into the void stepped Nvidia, a chipmaker that had previously excelled at graphics processing for video games. The math behind graphics processing aligned well with the requirements for AI, and Nvidia became the go-to player in the chip market. Between 2016 and early 2018, the company’s stock price multiplied by a factor of ten.

Maybe ET will use math to get our attention—a string of prime numbers, perhaps, or the apparently omnipresent, omni-important Pythagorean theorem. High school trig teachers should rebrand it the alien communication formula. That would’ve kept you from daydreaming in class, right?

Good writing is like math: it has logic and structure. It feels solid to the reader: the writer is in control, having taken on the heavy burden of making a piece of writing clear and accessible. It might not follow a formula, exactly. But there's a kind of geometric architecture to it.

I was talking to a homeless man at a laundromat recently, and he said when we reduce Christian spirituality to math, we defile the holy. I thought that was very beautiful and comforting. Because I have never been good at math. Many of our attempts to understand christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than a pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas, such as “God is good”, “God feels”, “God knows all”, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on his majesty and otherness forever. This past summer I made the point to catch sunsets...fire in the clouds. I never really wanted to make the trip...but once I got up there, I always loved it...all that beauty happens right above the heads of more than a million people who never notice it. Here is what I’ve started thinking. All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I climb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view; the more my heart enters into worship. When we worship God, we worship a being our experience does not give us the tools to understand. If we could, God would not inspire awe.” —Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller

Skaidon was a genius. At age six he took one of the old-style IQ tests and was rated at 180. After he was congratulated, it is reported that he said, ‘If you like I’ll do a test to 190, now I know how they work.’ Throughout his life Skaidon mocked those he called, ‘Hard-wired lead-asses.’ Should you wish to know more about this, I direct you to one of his numerous biographies. This book is about runcibles. Today we are aware of the dangers of directly interfacing a human mind with a computer (not to be confused with the less direct methods of auging or gridlinking). Skaidon was the first to do this and he died of it, leaving a legacy to humanity that is awesome. It took him twenty-three minutes. In those minutes, he and the Craystein computer became the most brilliant mind humankind has ever known. He gave us Skaidon technology, from which has come instantaneous travel, antigravity and much of our field technology. The Craystein computer, in its super-cooled vault under the city of London on Earth, contains the math and blueprints for the runcible (for reasons not adequately explained, Skaidon loved the nonsense poem by Edward Lear and used its wording in his formulae to stand for those particles and states of existence we until then had no words for, hence: runcible – the device; spoon – the five-dimensional field that breaks into nil-space; pea-green is a particle now tentatively identified as the tachyon) and to begin to understand some of this math let us first deal with that nil-space shibboleth wrongly described as quantum planing . . . An Introduction to Skaidon Formulae by Ashanta Gorian