Ian Stewart > Quotes

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.”
― Ian Stewart, Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

“Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resembe what actually happens.”
― Ian Stewart

“IQ is a statistical method for quantifying specific kinds of problem-solving ability, mathematically convenient but not necessarily corresponding to a real attribute of the human brain, and not necessarily representing whatever it is that we mean by ‘intelligence’.”
― Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

“Unless you are genuinely interested in working with someone, don't. It doesn't matter how big an expert they are, or how much grant money the project would bring in. Stay away from things that do not interest you.”
― Ian Stewart, Letters to a Young Mathematician

“In mathematics, it's unwise to abandon an interesting idea just because it's wrong.”
― Ian Stewart, Infinity: A Very Short Introduction

“Maxwell's equations didn't just change the world. They opened up a new one.”
― Ian Stewart

“Music can be appreciated from several points of view: the listener, the performer, the composer. In mathematics there is nothing analogous to the listener; and even if there were, it would be the composer, rather than the performer, that would interest him. It is the creation of new mathematics, rather than its mundane practice, that is interesting. Mathematics is not about symbols and calculations. These are just tools of the tradequavers and crotchets and five-finger exercises. Mathematics is about ideas. In particular it is about the way that different ideas relate to each other. If certain information is known, what else must necessarily follow? The aim of mathematics is to understand such questions by stripping away the inessentials and penetrating to the core of the problem. It is not just a question of getting the right answer; more a matter of understanding why an answer is possible at all, and why it takes the form that it does. Good mathematics has an air of economy and an element of surprise. But, above all, it has significance.”
― Ian Stewart

“Math is a product of human minds but not bendable to human will”
― Ian Stewart, Letters to a Young Mathematician

“Haosul nu este întâmplător: el este o comportare aparent întâmplătoare, rezultând din reguli foarte precise. Haosul este o formă criptică de ordine.”
― Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality Of Mathematics

“Something that doesn't actually exist can still be useful.”
― Ian Stewart, Infinity: A Very Short Introduction

“Platonist view of mathematical ideas: that mathematical truths ‘really’ exist, but they do so in an ideal form in some sort of parallel reality, which has always existed and always will.”
― Ian Stewart, Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians

“The urban myth that carrots are good for your eyesight originated in wartime disinformation, intended to stop the Nazis wondering why the British were getting so good at spotting raiding bombers.”
― Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

“Why resort to welfare cuts when you could aim more accurately at what you claim to be the real problem: intelligence itself? Why not improve education? Indeed, why aim your policy at increasing intelligence at all? There are many other desirable human traits. Why not reduce gullibility, aggressiveness, or greed?”
― Ian Stewart, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

“Lucrul cel mai simplu pe care îl ai de făcut atunci când trebuie să te mişti, dar nu poţi evada, este să oscilezi.”
― Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality Of Mathematics

“Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is.     Good”
― Ian Stewart, Concepts of Modern Mathematics

“Most information doesn’t constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that’s a very different concept from information.”
― Ian Stewart

“The Black–Scholes equation changed the world by creating a booming quadrillion-dollar industry; its generalisations, used unintelligently by a small coterie of bankers, changed the world again by contributing to a multitrillion-dollar financial crash whose ever more malign effects, now extending to entire national economics, are still being felt worldwide.”
― Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

“Muchas margaritas tienen 34 pétalos, si no, normalmente tienen 55 u 89. En general, raras veces verás una margarita con 37 pétalos y si ves una con 33 es probable que se le haya caído un pétalo. Los girasoles, los cuales pertenecen a la familia de las margaritas, normalmente tienen 55, 89 o 144 pétalos.”
― Ian Stewart

“Barzellette matematiche I (*)
Un biologo, uno statistico e un matematico sono seduti un caffè e guardano alla gente che passa.
Un uomo e una donna entrano in un palazzo dall'altra parte della strada. Dieci minuti dopo ne escono accompagnati da un bambino.
"Si sono riprodotti" dice il biologo.
"No" ribatte lo statistico. "È un errore nell'osservazione. In media sono sia entrate sia uscite due persone mezza".
"No, no, no" interviene il matematico. "È del tutto ovvio. Se adesso entra qualcuno, il palazzo sarà vuoto".

(*) Lo scopo principale di queste barzellette non è farvi ridere, ma mostrarvi che cos'è che fa ridere i matematici e consentirvi di sbirciare in un angolo oscuro del loro ambiente culturale.”
― Ian Stewart, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

“This is rather an awe-inspiring statement to get out of a straightforward uniqueness theorem in mathematics.”
― Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?: The New Mathematics of Chaos

“En realidad, una de las grandes fortalezas de la ciencia es la habilidad para inferir cosas que no podemos observar directamente a partir de las que sí podemos.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is [exists]. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. . . There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.”
― Ian Stewart, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World

“El universo es infinitamente rico y complejo y suceden en él todo tipo de cosas maravillosas. Pero no deberíamos confundir los resultados con las causas e imaginar que el propósito del universo es hacer seres humanos.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“The American mathematician Jeffrey Weeks analysed the statistics of these fluctuations for manifolds with a variety of topologies. One possibility fitted the data very closely, leading the media to announce that the universe is shaped like a football (US: soccer ball). This was an inevitable metaphor for a shape that goes back to Poincaré: the dodecahedral space. In the early twenty-first century footballs were made by sewing or gluing together 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons to make what mathematicians call a truncated icosahedron – an icosahedron with the corners cut off. An icosahedron is a regular solid with 20 triangular faces, arranged five to a corner. The dodecahedron, which has 12 pentagonal faces, gets into the act because the centres of the faces of an icosahedron form a dodecahedron, so both solids have the same symmetries. ‘Football’ is more media-friendly, albeit technically imprecise.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“This is Lorenz’s famous (and widely misunderstood) butterfly effect: a flap of a butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane a month later, halfway round the world.
If you think that sounds implausible, I don’t blame you. It’s true, but only in a very special sense. The main potential source of misunderstanding is the word ‘cause’. It’s hard to see how the tiny amount of energy in the flap of a wing can create the huge energy in a hurricane. The answer is, it doesn’t. The energy in the hurricane doesn’t come from the flap: it’s redistributed from elsewhere, when the flap interacts with the rest of the otherwise unchanged weather system.
After the flap, we don’t get exactly the same weather as before except for an extra hurricane. Instead, the entire pattern of weather changes, worldwide. At first the change is small, but it grows – not in energy, but in difference from what it would otherwise have been. And that difference rapidly becomes large and unpredictable. If the butterfly had flapped its wings two seconds later, it might have ‘caused’ a tornado in the Philippines instead, compensated for by snowstorms over Siberia. Or a month of settled weather in the Sahara, for that matter.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“Even today, women are generally under-represented in mathematics and science, but it’s no longer socially acceptable to attribute this to differences in ability or mentality, as several prominent men have discovered to their dismay. Nor is there a shred of evidence to support those views.”
― Ian Stewart, Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians

“On the other hand, these events show real science in action, warts and all. If no one is allowed to get things wrong, no progress will ever be made. It also illustrates scientists’ willingness to change their minds when new evidence comes along or old evidence is shown to be misleading.”
― Ian Stewart, Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe

“In the rush to market, experiments have been carried out on a large scale in the natural environment, when controlled laboratory testing would have been far more effective and informative. The British Government sanctioned large-scale planting of genetically modified plants in order to test whether their pollen spread only a few meters (as expected) and to make sure that the new gene would not be spontaneously incorporated into other species of plants (ditto). It turned out that the pollen spread for miles, and the new genes could transfer without difficulty to other plants. Effects like this could, for example, create pesticide-resistant strains of weeds. By the time the experiment had revealed that the conventional wisdom was wrong, there was no way to get the pollen, or its genes, back. Simple laboratory tests – such as painting pollen onto plants directly – could have established the same facts more cheaply, without releasing anything into the environment. It was a bit like fireproofing chemical by spraying it on a city and setting the place alight, with the added twist that the ‘fire’ might spread indefinitely if, contrary to expectations, it took hold.”
― Ian Stewart