“A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.”

—  Vannevar Bush, book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily …" by Vannevar Bush?
Vannevar Bush photo
Vannevar Bush57
American electrical engineer and science administrator 1890–1974

Related quotes

P.G. Wodehouse photo

“He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

The Clicking Of Cuthbert (1922)

Confucius photo

“The Man who says he can, and the man who says he can not.. Are both correct”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo

“A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On John Dryden (1828)

“… a man can overcome his background, even as he can overcome a skilled opponent.”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 13

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Livy photo

“Nature has ordained that the man who is pleading his own cause before a large audience, will be more readily listened to than he who has no object in view other than the public benefit.”

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book III, sec. 68
History of Rome

Robert Jordan photo

“…but who can know the heart of a man? Not even he himself, I suspect. A man is the easiest animal to put on a leash, and the hardest to keep leashed. Even when he chooses it himself.”

Robert Jordan The Dragon Reborn

Siuan Sanche
The Dragon Reborn (15 October 1991)

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“No society can possibly be built upon a denial of individual freedom. It is contrary to the very nature of man. Just as a man will not grow horns or a tail, so will he not exist as man if he has no mind of his own. In reality even those who do not believe in the liberty of the individual believe in their own.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict by Joan V. Bondurant (1965) University of California Press, Berkeley: CA, p. 174. Harijan (1 February 1942) p. 27
1940s

John Keats photo

“I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Related topics