Subject: My Favorite Mathematics Quote
Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 14:33:03 -0700
From: Anne Palmer Johnson

Greetings from Rappahannock County VA

I was unable, after several tries (Netscape 2.0), to activate your link directly from your Submit button at the bottom of your Quotations page. Here are my selections:

Feynman is my preference in that it seems to capture the "why" of mathematics which generally is not as well understood as the "what" of mathematics.

Gibbs is my favorite because his simple quote brings back fond memories of my father who loved the simplicity of math and used this quotation frequently. You have made the quote all the more pleasurable by providing the story behind the quote. Thank you.

About your logo . . . it suggests that you have five dimensions. If spiritual, physical and intellectual are three, what might be the fourth and fifth dimensions?

Subject: Mathematics is a language.
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 21:48:27
From: Dan Lee

I think I know where this Gibbs quote came from. *I* read it in a biography of JW Gibbs. I don't know if there's more than one full-length biography of him, so it shouldn't be too hard to find. And not only did Gibbs say that math was a language, but he also stated that math should count as a foreign language requirement, something that I think Harvard should do too :) But anyway, Gibbs had made other speeches besides that one. One that comes to mind is a speech in which he expressed the need for improvement in the use of units. At the time, of course, scientists had a tendency to use things like pounds as both a unit of mass and force. Apparently, he came up with a few wacky solutions to this problem of ambiguous unit usage.

Copyright © 1996-2010 Alexander Bogomolny

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