59 Quotes by Ian Stewart

The forecasts have been a bit too sanguine, given that the lead indicators of input prices have been quite strong.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don’t.

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.

Mathematicians need proofs to keep them honest. All technical areas of human activity need reality checks. It is not enough to believe that something works, that it is a good way to proceed, or even that it is true. We need to know why it’s true. Otherwise, we won’t know anything at all.

Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as “the queen of mathematics.” Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss.

Maxwell’s equations didn’t just change the world. They opened up a new one.

Math is a product of human minds but not bendable to human will.

Unless you are genuinely interested in working with someone, don’t. It doesn’t matter how big an expert they are, or how much grant money the project would bring in. Stay away from things that do not interest you.

The Black–Scholes equation changed the world by creating a booming quadrillion-dollar industry; its generalisations, used unintelligently by a small coterie of bankers, changed the world again by contributing to a multitrillion-dollar financial crash whose ever more malign effects, now extending to entire national economics, are still being felt worldwide.