A Quote by Benjamin Haydon
Newton's health, and confusion to mathematics.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Throughout his life Newton must have devoted at least as much attention to chemistry and theology as to mathematics.
Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.
Daily, from sunrise to sunset, the radio, newspapers and magazines broadcast to the world how to maintain health, how to regain health... the conflicting information, expressive of the different opinions of these various health authorities, has proved to be nothing less than confusion.
He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion.
Life is full of confusion. Confusion of love, passion, and romance. Confusion of family and friends. Confusion with life itself. What path we take, what turns we make. How we roll our dice.
Mystery is an inescapable ingredient of mathematics. Mathematics is full of unanswered questions, which far outnumber known theorems and results. It's the nature of mathematics to pose more problems than it can solve. Indeed, mathematics itself may be built on small islands of truth comprising the pieces of mathematics that can be validated by relatively short proofs. All else is speculation.
[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough.
We have misunderstood our confusion when we think there is an answer to it. The confusion is not a result of questions that are too hard, but rather a questioner who is disintegrating. Confusion is the introduction to true intelligence.
Those who condemn the supreme certainty of mathematics feed on confusion, and can never silence the contradictions of the sophistical sciences which lead to eternal quackery.
[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction.
Newton came up with Newton's laws of motion and gravity. They worked. They were working.
You don't discard Newton. Newton becomes the limiting case of how you would apply Einstein's theories.
No theory changes what it is a theory about. Nothing is changed because we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way. Keats drank confusion to Newton for analyzing the rainbow, but the rainbow remained as beautiful as ever and became for many even more beautiful. Man has not changed because we look at him, talk about him, and analyze him scientifically. ... What does change is our chance of doing something about the subject of a theory. Newton's analysis of the light in a rainbow was a step in the direction of the laser.
I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
Related Authors
Ai Weiwei Quotes
Chinese
Artist
Andy Warhol Quotes
American
Artist
Claude Monet Quotes
French
Artist
David Hockney Quotes
English
Artist
Gerhard Richter Quotes
German
Artist
Henri Matisse Quotes
French
Artist
Kehinde Wiley Quotes
American
Artist
Leonardo da Vinci Quotes
Italian
Artist
Marcel Duchamp Quotes
French
Artist
Marina Abramovic Quotes
Serbian
Artist
Maurice Sendak Quotes
American
Artist
Michelangelo Quotes
Italian
Artist
Paul Cezanne Quotes
French
Artist
Robert Genn Quotes
Canadian
Artist
Robert Henri Quotes
American
Artist
Yoko Ono Quotes
American
Artist