Ivars Peterson Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Ivars Peterson: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Ivars Peterson Quotes

“To an increasing number of practitioners, computer simulations rooted in mathematics represent a third way of doing science, alongside theory and experiment.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Mathematical Tourist: New and Updated Snapshots of Modern Mathematics (1998), Chapter 1, “Explorations” (p. 10)

“Randomness, chaos, uncertainty, and chance are all a part of our lives. They reside at the ill-defined boundaries between what we know, what we can know, and what is beyond our knowing. They make life interesting.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 202)

“The aim of science is to reduce the scope of chance.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 201; quoting Hegel)

“Indeed, mathematics is full of conjectures—questions waiting for answers—with no assurance that the answers even exist.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 199)

“Most coincidences are simply chance events that turn out to be far more probable than many people imagine.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 188)

“In mathematics, in science, and in life, we constantly face the delicate, tricky task of separating design from happenstance.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 2, “Sea of Life” (p. 43)

“Ramsey theory implies that complete disorder is impossible. Somehow, no matter how complicated, chaotic, or random something appears, deep within that morass lurks a smaller entity that has a definite structure. Striking regularities are bound to arise even in a universe that has no rules.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 2, “Sea of Life” (p. 25)

“The theory of probability combines commonsense reasoning with calculation. It domesticates luck, making it subservient to reason.”

Ivars Peterson

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 1, “The Die is Cast” (p. 19)

“Intriguingly, the mathematics of randomness, chaos, and order also furnishes what may be a vital escape from absolute certainty—an opportunity to exercise free will in a deterministic universe. Indeed, in the interplay of order and disorder that makes life interesting, we appear perpetually poised in a state of enticingly precarious perplexity. The universe is neither so crazy that we can’t understand it at all nor so predictable that there’s nothing left for us to discover.”

Ivars Peterson

Preface, “Infinite Possibility” (p. xiii)
The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)

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