{"quotes":[{"text":"If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... To fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What’s so special about humans...?', I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What’s so special about that?","author":"Shelly Kagan","tags":["calculus","complex-nervous-systems","debate","humanity","humans","meaning","poetry","purpose","special"],"id":1693,"author_id":"Shelly+Kagan"},{"text":"Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers I.E. The ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. After 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation.[Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa].","author":"Ahmed Djebbar","tags":["calculus","fibonacci","fractions","history-of-science","mathematicians","mathematics"],"id":64500,"author_id":"Ahmed+Djebbar"},{"text":"You can't teach calculus to a chimpanzee. So just share your banana.","author":"John Rachel","tags":["banana","calculus","chimpanzee","education","golden-rule","lyme-disease"],"id":79244,"author_id":"John+Rachel"},{"text":"Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... It may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... Drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.","author":"John Wallis","tags":["calculus","dimensions","infinitesimal-calculus","math","mathematician","mathematics","nature","science","scientist","space"],"id":135014,"author_id":"John+Wallis"},{"text":"Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.","author":"Leonhard Euler","tags":["calculus","mathematics"],"id":157543,"author_id":"Leonhard+Euler"},{"text":"I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy.","author":"Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth","tags":["biology","calculus","chemistry","easy","empowering","math","nobel-laureate","physics","science"],"id":202596,"author_id":"Marshall+Nicholas+Rosenbluth"},{"text":"The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.","author":"Nicholas Murray Butler","tags":["analytical-geometry","calculus","carl-friedrich-gauss","descartes","gauss","geometry","gottfried-leibniz","gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz","isaac-newton","leibniz","lobachevsky","mathematics","newton","philosophers","philosophy","reason","rene-descartes","riemann","science","scientists","supremacy","sylvester"],"id":205185,"author_id":"Nicholas+Murray+Butler"},{"text":"The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point.","author":"Felix Klein","tags":["algebra","algebraic-analysis","calculus","difficulty","infinitesimal-calculus","math","mathematics","science","teacher"],"id":216492,"author_id":"Felix+Klein"},{"text":"Normal. She wanted normal and so did I. 'You know what's normal?'What?' She wiped away her remaining tears. 'Calculus.","author":"Katie McGarry","tags":["calculus","emotion","normal"],"id":234290,"author_id":"Katie+McGarry"},{"text":"I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again. That is perhaps the greatest gift one can gain by delving into calculus: It is a whole new way of looking at the world, accessible only through the realm of mathematics.","author":"Jennifer Ouellette","tags":["calculus","math","perspective"],"id":385552,"author_id":"Jennifer+Ouellette"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}