What do you think?
Rate this book
Mathematically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations
For the first time, a book has brought together in one easily accessible form the best expressed thoughts that are especially illuminating and pertinent to the discipline of mathematics. Mathematically A Dictionary of Quotations provides profound, wise, and witty quotes from the most famous to the unknown. You may not find all the quoted "jewels" that exist, but you will definitely a great many of them here. The extensive author and subject indexes provide you with the perfect tools for locating quotations for practical use or pleasure, and you will soon enjoy discovering what others have said on topics ranging from addition to zero.
This book will be a handy reference for the mathematician or scientific reader and the wider public interested in who has said what on mathematics.
This book will be a handy reference for the mathematician or scientific reader and the wider public interested in who has said what on mathematics.
- GenresScience
484 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
10 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 26, 2015
As is the case for all quotation books, a lot of the quotes included in this work aren't very good, interesting, funny, or enlightening. The book has just about enough 'decent' quotes interspersed throughout the pages to enable the reader to justify reading on, but the number of interesting/decent/etc. quotes in the book is not much higher than that.
The book is structured in a manner which means that it's basically 'a collection of quote-collections' on a wide variety of mathematics-related topics; there are collections of quotes on a wide variety of topics included ('mathematicians', 'topology', 'models', etc.), each of them ordered alphabetically by author name. This structure would make some sense if you had a lot of good quotes about a lot of different topics, but it makes less sense if this structure means that you feel forced to include both an 80 page topic about 'mathematics' and a lot of one-page topics with only a single quote on the topic in question; why would you include a category of quotes about ordinals if you only have one quote about ordinals, and why would you devote an entire page to that one quote? On a related note the book reads a bit as if the authors were paid by the page, and you could probably relatively easily have included the same number of quotes in a book only containing half as many pages as this book does.
Like most quotes books the book includes some repeats, with the same quote included multiple times throughout the coverage; this is not an unforgivable offense in my book, but there are too many repeats and one particular example in my opinion makes the authors look really bad. On page 263 the same quote is thus included twice *on the same page*, the quote in question being attributed to two different people on that page: We are told that according to a 'Source Unknown', "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models", and then on the line immediately below that quote we are told by the authors that John von Neumann has said that: "... the sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models." In my opinion if you can find something like that in a book like this, it does not make the authors look good, to put it mildly. Did they even read the book before they published it?
As mentioned there were enough semi-decent quotes to keep me reading the book to the end, but this book is far from a particularly great collection of quotes.
The book is structured in a manner which means that it's basically 'a collection of quote-collections' on a wide variety of mathematics-related topics; there are collections of quotes on a wide variety of topics included ('mathematicians', 'topology', 'models', etc.), each of them ordered alphabetically by author name. This structure would make some sense if you had a lot of good quotes about a lot of different topics, but it makes less sense if this structure means that you feel forced to include both an 80 page topic about 'mathematics' and a lot of one-page topics with only a single quote on the topic in question; why would you include a category of quotes about ordinals if you only have one quote about ordinals, and why would you devote an entire page to that one quote? On a related note the book reads a bit as if the authors were paid by the page, and you could probably relatively easily have included the same number of quotes in a book only containing half as many pages as this book does.
Like most quotes books the book includes some repeats, with the same quote included multiple times throughout the coverage; this is not an unforgivable offense in my book, but there are too many repeats and one particular example in my opinion makes the authors look really bad. On page 263 the same quote is thus included twice *on the same page*, the quote in question being attributed to two different people on that page: We are told that according to a 'Source Unknown', "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models", and then on the line immediately below that quote we are told by the authors that John von Neumann has said that: "... the sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models." In my opinion if you can find something like that in a book like this, it does not make the authors look good, to put it mildly. Did they even read the book before they published it?
As mentioned there were enough semi-decent quotes to keep me reading the book to the end, but this book is far from a particularly great collection of quotes.
September 22, 2007
A decent enough compendium, though the organization of the book is not particularly appealing. There are some nuggets buried in the book, but you will come across them only by accident.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews