Paul Lockhart · 144 pages
Rating: (1.5K votes)
“It is the story that matters not just the ending.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion—not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don't understand what your creation is up to; to have a break-through idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Mathematics is the art of explanation.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might glimpse some kind of secret underlying truth, some sort of message from the gods.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“In any case, do you really think kids even want something that is relevant to their daily lives? You think something practical like compound interest is going to get them excited? People enjoy fantasy, and that is just what mathematics can provide -- a relief from daily life, an anodyne to the practical workaday world.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“A good problem is something you don't know how to solve. That's what makes it a good puzzle and a good opportunity.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Be honest: did you actually read [the above geometric proof]? Of course not. Who would want to?
The effect of such a production being made over something so simple is to make people doubt their own intuition. Calling into question the obvious by insisting that it be 'rigorously proved' ... is to say to a student 'Your feelings and ideas are suspect. You need to think and speak our way.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“[Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“So how does one go about proving something like this? It's not like being a lawyer, where the goal is to persuade other people; nor is it like a scientist testing a theory. This is a unique art form within the world of rational science. We are trying to craft a "poem of reason" that explains fully and clearly and satisfies the pickiest demands of logic, while at the same time giving us goosebumps.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing or excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students?”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“To say that math is important because it is useful is like saying that children are important because we can train them to do spiritually meaningless labor in order to increase corporate profits. Or is that in fact what we are saying?”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“If there is anything like a unifying aesthetic principle in mathematics, it is this: simple is beautiful. Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplest possible things are imaginary.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“I don't see how it's doing society any good to have it's members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making — even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“no hay nada tan onírico y poético, nada tan radical, subversivo y psicodélico como las matemáticas. Es tan impresionante como la cosmología o la física (los matemáticos concibieron los agujeros negros mucho antes de que los astrónomos encontrasen uno), y permite más libertad de expresión que la poesía, el arte o la música (que dependen mucho en las propiedades físicas del universo). Las matemáticas son el arte más puro, así como el más incomprendido.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“having an honest intellectual relationship with our students and our subject.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“... This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.
On the other hand, once you have made your choices then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back!”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“So [in mathematics] we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do ... The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician’s art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it’s fascinating, it’s fun, and it’s free!”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Worse, the perpetuation of this “pseudo-mathematics,” this emphasis on the accurate yet mindless manipulation of symbols, creates its own culture and its own set of values. Those”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“The last thing they want to hear is that math is really about raw creativity and aesthetic sensitivity. Many”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“Qué irónico que la gente descarte las matemáticas como la antítesis de la creatividad. Están desperdiciando una forma de arte más antigua que cualquier libro, más profunda que cualquier poema, y más abstracta que cualquier otra cosa.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“SIMPLICIO: ... You have to [learn to] walk before you can run.
SALVIATI: No, you have to have something you want to run toward.”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“all the education degrees in the world won’t help you, and”
― Paul Lockhart, quote from A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
“The line between education and brainwashing is paper thin”
― Yana Toboso, quote from Black Butler, Vol. 1
“However opinionated, perhaps even high-handed his presentations were, he was unquestionably an ingenious man--that was evident in the stimulating, thought-provoking effect his words had on a highly gifted young mind like Adri Leverkühn's. What had chiefly impressed him, as he revealed on the way home and the following day in the schoolyard, was the distinction Kretzschmar had made between cultic and cultural epochs and his observation that the secularization of art, its separation from worship, was of only a superficial and episodic nature. The high-school sophomore was manifestly moved by an idea that the lecturer had not even articulated, but that had caught fire in him:: that the separation of art from any liturgical context, its liberation and elevation to the isolated and personal, to culture for culture's sake, had burdened it with a solemnity without any point of reference, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering epitomized in Beethoven's terrible appearance in the doorway--but that did not have to be its abiding destiny, its perpetual state of mind. Just listen to the young man! With almost no real, practical experience in the field of art, he was fantasizing in a void and in precocious words about art's apparently imminent retreat from its present-day role to a happier, more modest one in the service of a higher fellowship, which did not have to be, as at one time, the Church. What it would be, he could not say.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Doctor Faustus
“Stevie, don't get cross, get even.”
― Jeffrey Archer, quote from Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
“We might be on the same page, but I wasn't happy about reading it.”
― Charlaine Harris, quote from Dead Reckoning
“You don’t listen.” “I always listen,” Ranger said. “I don’t always agree. I have a problem right now that I can’t seem to solve by myself. I need you to help me find my daughter. And there’s an even bigger problem involved. I feel a financial and moral obligation to my daughter. I send child support, I send birthday and Christmas presents, I visit when I’m invited. But I’ve kept myself emotionally distanced. I’m not emotionally distanced from you. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you because I was using you to find someone . . . even if that someone was my daughter. So I have to make every effort to keep you safe.” “You’re a little smothering.”
― Janet Evanovich, quote from Twelve Sharp
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.