Tom Lehrer: “I’ve often thought I’d like to write a mathematics textbook someday because I have a title that I know will sell a million copies; I’m gonna call it Tropic of Calculus.” (1965)
Steven Strogatz, The Joy of x (2012)
Math doesn’t ….. (NSFW language).
By way of Steven Strogatz
One of Robert A. Heinlein’s characters expressed a similar opinion, slightly more politely and much more concisely.
I can think of a local science fiction convention that could use this hotel, except that Hilbert did not say how to deal with the congestion at the elevators. An exercise for the reader, I suppose.
From Jennifer Ouellette
Note: Quantum Electrodynamics works. The predictions it makes have been experimentally confirmed to many decimal places.
I first visited the complex plane 45 years ago, in High School. It was love at first sight, and I have been smitten ever since. Thank you, Margaret Matchett, my math teacher that year.
EDIT: I just looked her up on the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Go back three “generations” and you get to Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work has fascinated me since I first heard about it, not long after Mrs. Matchett’s math class.
Some surprising (to me, anyway) information about the history of the Golden Ratio. Also a cool animation of how to construct a pentagon by straight-edge and compass, and also (by cheating) a heptagon.
Examples from Tom Lehrer’s own field:
