Calculus Quotes

“You can't teach calculus to a chimpanzee. So just share your banana.”
― John Rachel, Blinders Keepers

“Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.”
― Leonhard Euler

“Normal. She wanted normal and so did I. "You know what's normal?"
"What?" She wiped away her remaining tears. "Calculus.”
― Katie McGarry

“What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now.
”
― Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math

“This book is for all of us who looked up at the sky in wonder, and then cried when we learned how much calculus separated us from the stars”
― K. Ancrum, The Weight of the Stars

“I abandoned the assigned problems in standard calculus textbooks and followed my curiosity. Wherever I happened to be--a Vegas casino, Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, or sweating on the elliptical in Boesel's Green Microgym--I asked myself, "Where is the calculus in this experience?”
― Jennifer Ouellette, The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

“Voltaire called the calculus "the Art of numbering and measuring exactly a Thing whose Existence cannot be conceived."
See Letters Concerning the English Nation p. 152”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“All the world's a differential equation, and the men and women are merely variables.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Math is a weave of many threads: the formal and the intuitive, the simple and the profound, the momentary and the eternal. Love the thread you love. But never mistake it for the tapestry.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“To a scholar, mathematics is music.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Psychology: it's sociology for sociopaths.”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact–it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.

Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics - and they are mostly clever fools - seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.

Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.”
― Silvanus Phillips Thompson, Calculus Made Easy

“Most mathematics deals with static objects such as circles and triangles and numbers. But the great universe "out there," not made by us, is in a constant state of what Newton called flux. At every microsecond it changes magically into something different. Calculus is the mathematics of change.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“Mathematics is not just a subject of education system, it is the soul of education system.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Most of his predecessors had considered the differential calculus as bound up with geometry, but Euler made the subject a formal theory of functions which had no need to revert to diagrams or geometrical conceptions.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“Carnot, one of a school of mathematicians who emphasized the relationship of mathematics to scientific practice, appears, in spite of the title of his work, to have been more concerned about the facility of application of the rules of procedure than about the logical reasoning involved.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“Cournot protested that concepts exist in the understanding, independently of the definition which one gives to them. Simple ideas sometimes have complicated definitions, or even none. For this reason he felt that one should not subordinate the precision of such ideas as those of speed or the infinitely small to logical definition. This point of view is diametrically opposed to that which analysis since the time of Cournot has been toward ever-greater care in the formal logical elaboration of the subject. This trend, initiated in the first half of the nineteenth century and fostered largely by Cauchy, was in the second half of that century continued with notable success by Weierstrass.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“In making the basis of the calculus more rigorously formal, Weierstrass also attacked the appeal to intuition of continuous motion which is implied in Cauchy's expression -- that a variable approaches a limit.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“Thus the required rigor was found in the application of the concept of number, made formal by divorcing it from the idea of geometrical quantity”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“Mathematics is unable to specify whether motion is continuous, for it deals merely with hypothetical relations and can make its variable continuous or discontinuous at will. The paradoxes of Zeno are consequences of the failure to appreciate this fact and of the resulting lack of a precise specification of the problem. The former is a matter of scientific description a posteriori, whereas the latter is a matter solely of mathematical definition a priori. The former may consequently suggest that motion be defined mathematically in terms of continuous variable, but cannot, because of the limitations of sensory perception, prove that it must be so defined.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“The mathematical theory of continuity is based, not on intuition, but on the logically developed theories of number and sets of points.”
― Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development

“With the star up above and the blackness of space, I can't avoid feeling awe. How could we, Homo sapiens, an insignificant species on an insignificant planet adrift in a middleweight galaxy, have managed to predict how space and time would tremble after two black holes collided in the vastness of the universe a billion light-years away? We knew what that wave should sound like before it got here. And, courtesy of calculus, computers, and Einstein, we were right.”
― Steven H. Strogatz, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe

“Most mathematics deals with static objects such as circles and triangles and numbers.
But the great universe "out there," not made by us, is in a constant state of what
Newton called flux. At every microsecond it changes magically into something different. Calculus is the mathematics of change.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“Cold Skills: IceXorb: Entering Square's Rectangle's Circles Phiknight's Quad Abstraction Skillers Occy's Keeper Crystals Swirling Whorling Sacred Globes Returning...”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Xora's P.A.S.S.A.G.E. XP: Sage, Gift, Pass, Staff Of Apocalypse, Sacred Globes, Light, Resistance, Square Abstract, Quad, Circle, Rectangle.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“OUT-Source.Expansion.Test.Underground.Passage SET UP: Fire Of Light, Sage Of Earth, Gift Of Winds, Water Of Xora, Sacred Globes, Staff Of Apocalypse, Quad Abstract, Square, Circle, Rectangle, Resistances.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“The techniques of calculus, powerful and general as they are, apply only to functions that are sufficently "well behaved" (Rogawski 21).”
― Jon Rogawski, Calculus: Early Transcendentals

“I sat down before I could de something stupid, like trip on the math homework scattered all over my floor and fall out my window. Death by calculus. I couldn’t imagine a worse way to go.”
― Tiana Smith, Match Me If You Can