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Newman, James R.

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications.

In J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

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Loci: Convergence

Mathematical Quotations

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D'Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717-1783)

Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this .... The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents .... Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer.


D'Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717-1783)

Just go on ... and faith will soon return.
[To a friend hesitant with respect to infinitesimals.]


da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)

Inequality is the cause of all local movements.


da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)

No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.


da Vinci, Leonardo (1452 - 1519)

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences, because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.


da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.


da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519)

Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.


Dantzig

Neither in the subjective nor in the objective world can we find a criterion for the reality of the number concept, because the first contains no such concept, and the second contains nothing that is free from the concept. How then can we arrive at a criterion? Not by evidence, for the dice of evidence are loaded. Not by logic, for logic has no existence independent of mathematics: it is only one phase of this multiplied necessity that we call mathematics.


Dantzig

The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight.


Darwin, Charles

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.


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