A Quote by John A. Van de Walle

Calculators can only calculate - they cannot do mathematics.

John A. Van de Walle

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Calculate Calculators Cannot Mathematics Only

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John A. Van de Walle
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Mathematics is much more than computation with pencil and a paper and getting answers to routine exercises. In fact, it can easily be argued that computation, such as doing long division, is not mathematics at all. Calculators can do the same thing and calculators can only calculate they cannot do mathematics.

John A. Van de Walle

One cannot inquire into the foundations and nature of mathematics without delving into the question of the operations by which the mathematical activity of the mind is conducted. If one failed to take that into account, then one would be left studying only the language in which mathematics is represented rather than the essence of mathematics.

L. E. J. Brouwer

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he doesn't know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

Zhuangzi

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

Stanislaw Lem

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

Alexander Hamilton

In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty years or so that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians agree: mathematics is the science of patterns.

Keith Devlin

My colleagues and I were engineers who worked for DCM's calculator division. These electronic calculators used digital integrated circuits, and then they started using chips. The advanced versions of those chips were used for programmable calculators, which were the forerunners of PCs.

Shiv Nadar

Doing research in mathematics is frustrating and if being frustrated is something you cannot get used to, then mathematics may not be an ideal occupation for you.

Peter Sarnak

I'm a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem--as I calculate it, of course--and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we're not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.

Harriet Lerner

There are four great sciences, without which the other sciences cannot be known nor a knowledge of things secured ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics ... He who is ignorant of this [mathematics] cannot know the other sciences nor the affairs of this world.

Roger Bacon

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity

G. H. Hardy

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.

Ernst Mach

To exist (in mathematics), said Henri Poincaré, is to be free from contradiction. But mere existence does not guarantee survival. To survive in mathematics requires a kind of vitality that cannot be described in purely logical terms.

Mark Kac

I never calculate. That is why those who do, calculate so much less accurately than I.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Ivars Peterson

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

A Quote by John A. Van de Walle

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