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I presume that to the uninitiated the formulae will appear cold and cheerless; but let it be remembered that, like other mathematical formulae, they find their origin in the divine source of all geometry. Whether I shall have the satisfaction of taking part in their exposition, or whether that will remain for some more profound expositor, will be seen in the future.
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Preface

 

Benjamin Peirce

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Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

 

Albert Einstein

 

There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages? We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.

 

Maria Mitchell

 

Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries.

 

Joseph Fourier

 

Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

 

C. Wright Mills

 

The assimilation of algebra by mathematical physics, a process spanning the eighteenth and extending into the nineteenth century, exacerbates the implicit thoughtlessness of classical science by subordinating scientific cognition to symbolic formulae increasingly devoid of insight. In the process, a genuine encounter with natural necessity, revelatory of divine providence, is lost to science, Symbolic or algebraic physics represents the collectivization of thought, as it were, where science itself is rendered a technique of knowledge production and thought ceases to be the activity of any responsible individual. ... This process reaches its logical conclusion in twentieth-century physics, where science is reduced finally to a form of symbolic manipulation the only value of which is predictive success and technological domination of nature.

 

Simone Weil