Let’s Play Math!

Photo by Brian - Progressive Spin.

Logic is the science of making valid deductions and proofs — and it is also a fruitful topic for blackboard quotes. Here are a few of my favorites:

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

— G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Orthodox

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Photo by foundphotoslj.

Here are a few mathematical gems from my co-op class blackboard:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

— John Adams

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it’s four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.

— Paul Erdös

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Priorities, motivation, and a little bit of math from my blackboard…

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

— Winston Churchill

In mathematics, the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.

— Georg Cantor

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Quotes from my blackboard during October:

Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward.

— Vernon Law

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

— David Eugene Smith

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Classes are back in session at our homeschool co-op, so I am again collecting short quotes for the blackboard. Here are the ones I used in September:

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

— Albert Einstein

Life without geometry is pointless.

— Anonymous

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

— Marvin Minsky

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• Quotations XV: More joy of mathematics
• Quotations XII: Mathematicians at play
• Math jokes
• Nothing is everything
• All odd numbers are prime — a corollary

I found this worksheet on the KISS Grammar website, and I loved the quotations so much I just had to share them:

In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.

— English proverb

One cat just leads to another.

— Ernest Hemingway

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Blame it on MathNotations and his Corny Math Jokes (which actually included one I hadn’t heard before) — or maybe I have been reading too many of Chickenfoot’s strange tales — but anyway, I’m in a mood for humor.

So here are a couple of old favorites:

The Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic
Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.

The First Strong Law of Small Numbers
There are not enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.

— Eric W. Weisstein
from MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource

Hat tip: These had gotten lost in the dustbunnies of my memory until I saw the Frivolous Theorem mentioned recently at Art of Problem Solving.

Edited to add: Scott at Grey Matters recently updated his Mathematical Humor post, which may be where I had originally read these. He links to several more great MathWorld jokes, including the ever-tasty Pizza Theorem.

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• In between sneezes…
• That’s mathematics
• A Very Short History of Mathematics
• For those really long family trips…
• Math quotes III: Five out of four people

Aaaargh! My Internet service is on the brink again. But since I had to run into my husband’s office to check email, I’ll take a few minutes to post a quick note. Here are a couple of quotes especially for teachers:

The only teaching that a professor can give, in my opinion, is that of thinking in front of his students.

— Henri Léon Lebesgue

A good student is one who will teach you something.

— Irving Kaplansky

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• Quotations VIII: The essence of mathematics
• Quotations XIX: How do we learn math?
• Confession: I am not good at math
• How to start a homeschool math club
• Substitute teacher experiments with combinatorics

Our homeschool co-op classes are done for the semester, so this will be my last compilation of blackboard quotes for awhile. I love collecting quotations, however, so I will be treating you to some of my favorites “just for teachers” over the summer. Stay tuned!

It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five problems one way.

—George Polya

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

—George Washington Carver

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Time to catch up on our blackboard quotes.

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“I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.”

— Charles Darwin
quoted in the Platonic Realms collection

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It’s been ages since I shared the blackboard quotes from my co-op math classes. Here are some of our recent ones for your reading pleasure…

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