All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The study of mathematics can be frustrating as it often seems beyond our grasp, despite its profound applications in understanding the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead reflects on the challenging nature of mathematics, suggesting that while it is essential for grasping vast concepts such as the weight of stars and the intricacies of molecules, it often leaves learners feeling disappointed and confused. He compares this elusiveness to the ghost of Hamlet's father, indicating that the true essence of mathematics can be difficult to apprehend fully, despite its significant contributions to science.
Themes
MathematicsScienceDisappointmentKnowledgeUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the importance of mathematics, one might quote Whitehead to illustrate the initial struggles students face.
More from Alfred North Whitehead
All quotes →The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
Similar quotes
I've had a chance to fly a lot of different airplanes, but it was nothing like the shuttle ride.
Chris HadfieldRead
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
William JamesRead
What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?
Camille FlammarionRead
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
Richard DawkinsRead
Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Neil Degrasse TysonRead
The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.
Jules VerneRead