Ivars Peterson: Quotes about mathematics

Ivars Peterson is Canadian mathematician. Explore interesting quotes on mathematics.

Ivars Peterson: 18 quotes0 likes

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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