Throughout the several books I've read on mathematics, I have formed a collection of quotes that I particularly like. I've listed some below and hope you like them as much as I do.
"'This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics,' observed commentator John Tierney. 'No matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it" (The Man Who Only Loved Numbers by Paul Hoffman)
"And he was realistic that in mathematics, as in other sciences, 'everything that can be used for good things can also be used for bad things. After all, the same differential equations which govern the spread of poison gases also govern how pollutants spread. So one can spread poison gases deliberately, but also one can prevent the spreading of pollution.'" (The Man Who Only Loved Numbers by Paul Hoffman)
"The tactical reason for sometimes using '∞' instead of 'infinity' in the natural-language text here is that the double-blink strangeness of '∞' serves as a reminder that it's not clear what we're even talking about. Not yet. For instance, beware of thinking that ∞ is just an incredibly, unbelievably enormous number." (Everything and More:A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace)
"Statisticians have a saying to deal with this problem: "Correlation does not imply causation." Just because two traits (like getting lung cancer and having yellow finger stains) tend to go together (i.e., are correlated), that does not necessarily prove that one causes the other. While no one would seriously conclude that yellow stains cause cancer, the issue of what causes what arises often and in many contexts." (Struck By Lightning by Jeffrey S. Rosenthal)
The Paradoxicality
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