Quotable Mathematics

"Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the da...

"With a true view all the data harmonize, but with a false one the facts soon clash." (Aristotle, "The Nicomachean Ethics...

"An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never met, even by those who make it; i.e., that empirical data should be presented wit...

"In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of o...

"The first step in beginning the scientific study of a problem is to collect the data, which are or ought to be 'facts'." ...

"Science is frankly empirical in method and aim; it seeks to discover the laws of concrete being and becoming, and to formulate these i...

"Science works by the slow method of the classification of data, arranging the detail patiently in a periodic system into groups of fac...

"Anyone can easily misuse good data." (William E Deming, "Some Theory of Sampling", 1950) "Data have an ephemeralne...

"When evaluating the reliability and generality of data, it is often important to know the aims of the experimenter. When evaluating th...

"At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ing...

"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories ar...

"The apparent simplicity of a model is due to a failure of imagination and limited data, unless the domain really is simple. If the wor...

"Building statistical models is just like this. You take a real situation with real data, messy as this is, and build a model that work...

"Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether...