The Joy of X Quotes

“Looking at numbers as groups of rocks may seem unusual, but actually it's as old as math itself. The word "calculate" reflects that legacy -- it comes from the Latin word calculus, meaning a pebble used for counting. To enjoy working with numbers you don't have to be Einstein (German for "one stone"), but it might help to have rocks in your head.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“(Actually, languages can be very tricky in this respect. The eminent linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin of Oxford once gave a lecture in which he asserted that there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive but none in which a double positive makes a negative—to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, sitting in the audience, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, yeah.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“In the early part of the ninth century, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician working in Baghdad, wrote a seminal textbook in which he highlighted the usefulness of restoring a quantity being subtracted (like 2, above) by adding it to the other side of an equation. He called this process al-jabr (Arabic for “restoring”), which later morphed into “algebra.” Then, long after his death, he hit the etymological jackpot again. His own name, al-Khwarizmi, lives on today in the word “algorithm.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“let’s begin with the word “vector.” It comes from the Latin root vehere, “to carry,” which also gives us words like “vehicle” and “conveyor belt.” To an epidemiologist, a vector is the carrier of a pathogen, like the mosquito that conveys malaria to your bloodstream. To a mathematician, a vector (at least in its simplest form) is a step that carries you from one place to another.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“—things that seem hopelessly random and unpredictable when viewed in isolation often turn out to be lawful and predictable when viewed in aggregate.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Those of us who teach math should try to turn this bug into a feature. We should be up front about the fact that word problems force us to make simplifying assumptions. That’s a valuable skill—it’s called mathematical modeling.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“When a guitar string is plucked or when children jiggle a jump rope, the shape that appears is a sine wave. The ripples on a pond, the ridges of sand dunes, the stripes of a zebra—all are manifestations of nature’s most basic mechanism of pattern formation: the emergence of sinusoidal structure from a background of bland uniformity.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“And because the PageRanks are defined as proportions, they have to add up to 1 when summed over the whole network. This conservation law suggests another, perhaps more palpable, way to visualize PageRank. Picture it as a fluid, a watery substance that flows through the network, draining away from bad pages and pooling at good ones. The algorithm seeks to determine how this fluid distributes itself across the network in the long run.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Nature—cue the theme from The Twilight Zone—somehow knows calculus.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“That’s the bleak message of the droopy curve. The primes are a dying breed. They never die out completely—we’ve known since Euclid they go on forever—but they fade into near oblivion.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“The electric field’s undulations re-created the magnetic field, which in turn re-created the electric field, and so on, with each pulling the other forward, something neither could do on its own.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Newton knew nothing about chaotic dynamics, but according to his friend Edmund Halley, he complained that the three-body problem had “made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more.” I’m with you there, Sir Isaac.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Their confusion is understandable. It’s caused by our reliance on graphs to express quantitative relationships. By plotting y versus x to visualize how one variable affects another, all scientists translate their problems into the common language of mathematics. The rate of change that really concerns them—a viral growth rate, a jet’s velocity, or whatever—then gets converted into something much more abstract but easier to picture: a slope on a graph.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Imagine using a photocopier to reduce an image of a circle by, say, 50 percent. Then all distances in the picture—including the circumference and the diameter—would shrink in proportion by 50 percent. So when you divide the new circumference by the new diameter, that 50 percent change would cancel out, leaving the ratio between them unaltered. That ratio is pi.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Sometimes when people say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they mean it figuratively, as a way of ridiculing nuance and affirming common sense. In other words, keep it simple. But battling obstacles can give rise to great beauty—so much so that in art, and in math, it’s often more fruitful to impose constraints on ourselves.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“We can decide what we mean by things like 6 and +, but once we do, the results of expressions like 6 + 6 are beyond our control. Logic leaves us no choice. In that sense, math always involves both invention and discovery: we invent the concepts but discover their consequences. As we’ll see in the coming chapters, in mathematics our freedom lies in the questions we ask—and in how we pursue them—but not in the answers awaiting us.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“This same sort of conversion of circular motion into sine waves is a pervasive, though often unnoticed, part of our daily experience. It creates the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead in our offices, a reminder that somewhere in the power grid, generators are spinning at sixty cycles per second, converting their rotary motion into alternating current, the electrical sine waves on which modern life depends.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Andrea says, “Obviously a dollar is ‘one, decimal, zero, zero,’ right? So what would a ‘point zero zero two dollars’ look like? . . . I’ve never heard of .002 dollars . . . It’s just not a full cent.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Calculated Risks, a fascinating book by Gerd Gigerenzer,”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread of epidemics to the zigs and zags of a well-thrown curveball. The subject is gargantuan—and so are its textbooks.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Whenever a state of featureless equilibrium loses stability—for whatever reason, and by whatever physical, biological, or chemical process—the pattern that appears first is a sine wave, or a combination of them.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“geometry is good for the mind; it trains you to think clearly and logically. It’s not the study of triangles, circles, and parallel lines per se that matters. What’s important is the axiomatic method, the process of building a rigorous argument, step by step, until a desired conclusion has been established.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Fractions always yield decimals that terminate or eventually repeat periodically—that can be proven—and since this decimal does neither, it can’t be equal to the ratio of any whole numbers. It’s irrational.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Perhaps the most unsettling thing is that a negative times a negative is a positive.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“If I try to take 6 cookies away from you but you have only 2, I can’t do it—except in my mind, where you now have negative 4 cookies, whatever that means.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“math always involves both invention and discovery: we invent the concepts but discover their consequences.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread of epidemics to the zigs and zags of a well-thrown curveball. The subject is gargantuan—and so are its textbooks. Many exceed a thousand pages and work nicely as doorstops.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“But my best hunch (and, full disclosure, I personally love geometry) is that people enjoy it because it marries logic and intuition. It feels good to use both halves of the brain.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Mathematics, from One to Infinity

“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.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

“resist”
― Steven H. Strogatz, The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity