Eugenia Cheng > Quotes

“...it's really more intelligent to be able to simplify things than to complicate them. Even if some people think it makes you look stupid.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“In a way, mathematics is like an emotion, which can’t ever be described precisely in words—it’s something that happens inside an individual. What”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“Thinking about more and more abstract concepts is a bit like the high jump. You have to get yourself over a progressively higher and higher bar, and if nobody explains how to do it, you will keep knocking the bar off and want to give up.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“The world is awash with terrible arguments, conflict, divisiveness, fake news, victimhood, exploitation, prejudice, bigotry, blame, shouting, and miniscule attention spans. When cat memes attract more attention than murders, is logic dead? When a headline goes viral regardless of its veracity, has rationality become futile? Too often, people make simple and dramatic statements for effect, impact, acclaim, and to try and grab some limelight in a world where endless sources are competing relentlessly for our attention all the time.”
― Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

“If people disagree, it’s often a result of different points of view stemming from different fundamental beliefs, not that one is right and the other is wrong.”
― Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

“Mathematics is the logical study of how logical things work.”
― Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

“At school if you write 10+4=2 you will be told that is wrong, but actually that's correct in some circumstances, such as telling the time - four hours later than 10 o'clock is indeed 2 o'clock.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“But category theory, like the New York marathon, is more about the journey and what you see along the way.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“just like the smallest possible set, this is initial in the category of categories.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“I am a mathematician, not a calculator.”
― Eugenia Cheng

“powerful aspect of abstraction is that many different situations become the same when you forget some details.”
― Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

“Convincing people that they are about to rise up while simultaneously keeping them down is a particularly pernicious way to maintain power.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“We were stuck thinking along the lines of men and women being "different," and distracted by questions of whether those differences are innatte or not. So we were stuck making a false choice between various gendered ideas of how to change the status quo.
We can now move away from all the gender-based choices. We can move away from pseudo-feminism or "leaning in", in which women are exhorted to become more like men in order to be successful. We can also move away from the opposite, in which men are asked to become more like women. We can move away from "reverse sexism," in which women are deliberately favored to make up for past oppression, and away from anti-feminism, in which women are told they simply biologically don't have the characteristics to be successful.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“I think that there is a lot of fear about robots and artificial intelligence among some people, whereas I'm more afraid of natural stupidity.”
― Eugenia Cheng

“Instead of being afraid of that darkness, we should bring everyone to the edge of it and say: Look! Here is an area that needs illumination Bring fire, torches, candles -- anything you can think of that will cast light. Then we can lay down our foundations and build our great buildings, cure diseases, invent fabulous new machines, and whatever else we think the human race should be doing. But first of all we need some light.”
― Eugenia Cheng

“In science, a “theory” is an explanation that is rigorously tested according to a clear framework, and deemed to be statistically highly likely to be correct. (More accurately, it is deemed statistically unlikely that the outcome would occur without the explanation being correct.)”
― Eugenia Cheng, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World

“Alfie Kohn describes "pseudofeminism" as seeking "the liberation of women through the imitation of men". It is a compounding of two assumptions: first, that gender differences are tied to character differences, and second, that the character types associated with men are more valuable, or even critical, for success. Of course, it's not just women who are imitating men; it's men too.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Mathematics is the study of anything that obeys the rules of logic, using the rules of logic.”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“Why is it possible to pay your way through college by means of competitive sports but not music or theater? Note that there are scholarships for musicians to study music, but the difference is that you can get an athletic scholarship to pay for your degree in something else. Why can't you get a music scholarship to pay for your math degree?”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“...if something about the environment is preventing women from being as successful as men, then imposing a quota without thinking about the environment is going to increase women's representation without necessarily increasing their success. This is perhaps encapsulated as the difference between diversity (which is about numbers) and inclusion (which is about environment).”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“I have found that sometimes when people want to use the phone it's just because they don't want to take the time to organize their thoughts into a written form. But sometimes it's because they want to put me on the spot and pressure me into doing something I don't really want to do, like take on more work, or accept less pay, or cause some other inconvenience to myself. In such cases, this is ingressive energy that I want to neutralize. I can do it quite simply: by using email instead of a phone call.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“If children are exposed to competitive games, they learn to become more and more competitive, but Kohn finds no studies showing a preference for competition once children have experienced cooperation. Preference is not the same as innateness, but if children prefer to be cooperative, this does throw doubt on the idea that people are "naturally" competitive.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“You might think that my congressive utopia is a lovely dream but can never become reality. Well, I always say that if we declare something to be impossible, then it will become impossible, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't have much to lose by trying, and who benefits if we don't? The people who benefit the most are the ingressive people who are currently in power. As Alfie Kohn says, "I would prefer to see skepticism directed at the status quo rather than employed in its service.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“In No Contest, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as coming from situations where resources are scarce. But education involves a resource that can never be scarce: one person having knowledge and wisdom does not prevent someone else from having it. It might be scarce in the sense that not many people have it, especially when it comes to very specialized knowledge, but the whole point of education should be to share knowledge and wisdom with the next generation and thus ensure that it keeps growing. So the fact that we make education competitive is at worst contradictory and at best a choice that we should acknowledge and question.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“When I finally did start thinking about being a woman, the aspect that struck me was: Why had I not felt any need to think about it before? And: How can we get to a place where nobody else needs to think about it either? I dream of a time when we can all think about character instead of gender, have role models based on character instead of gender, and think about the character types in different fields and walks of life instead of the gender balance.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“As we have described, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as something that happens when resources are scarce, From here we get the idea that competition is a "natural" behaviour, because "in nature" resources are scarce and so we have to compete for them. The thing is that, as with education, in many situations in modern life there isn't any real expendable resource at play, but a scarcity is fabricated in order to create artificial competition.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Research involves collaboration, reference to all the existing literature, and doing things nobody knows how to do yet, in a timeframe, usually, of years.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“You can tell this is going on in normal life when some superlative a slightly absurd number of qualifiers. For”
― Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics

“...there is a trade-off between how measurable something is and how meaningful it is likely to be in terms of actual behaviour.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender

“Some people, in some situations, are from Mars, and others, in other situations, are from Venus, and it's often men who are one and women who are the other but not necessarily, and you might be both at different times in different situations." That is a somewhat less catchy title.”
― Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender