Arithmetic Quotes

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. (Eric Hoffer)
The analysis of variance is not a mathematical theorem, but rather a convenient method of arranging the arithmetic. View quote
Ronald Fisher
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. View quote
Vannevar Bush
The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself. View quote
Howard H. Aiken
I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic. View quote
Mitch Daniels
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light. View quote
Claude Debussy
What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors? View quote
Sydney Smith
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing. View quote
Mignon McLaughlin
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise. View quote
Terry Pratchett
Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic. View quote
Gottlob Frege
I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect... Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics. (Carl Friedrich Gauss)
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. View quote
John McCarthy (computer scientist)
We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know. View quote
Susan George
Some writers maintain arithmetic to be only the only sure guide in political economy; for my part, I see so many detestable systems built upon arithmetical statements, that I am rather inclined to regard that science as the instrument of national calamity. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time. View quote
Carl Sandburg
Arithmetic must be discovered in just the same sense in which Columbus discovered the West Indies, and we no more create numbers than he created the Indians. View quote
Bertrand Russell
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. View quote
Pierre-Simon Laplace
If I compare arithmetic with a tree that unfolds upward into a multitude of techniques and theorems while its root drives into the depths, then it seems to me that the impetus of the root. View quote
Gottlob Frege
Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the "superior knowledge" that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. View quote
Stanisław Lem
The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. View quote
Carl Friedrich Gauss
The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. ... Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated. (Carl Friedrich Gauss)
Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations. View quote
Arthur Koestler
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting. View quote
Gottfried Leibniz
I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations. View quote
Adam Smith
We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. View quote
Daniel Dennett