Quotable Mathematics

"Although complex systems may vary enormously in their form and  function, most share a common underlying pattern: they consist of ens...

"Our initial perplexity before nature is explained by our seeing at first the small outer branches and not penetrating to the main bran...

"It has been a fortunate fact in the modern history of physical science that the scientist constructing a new theoretical system has ne...

"Although arguments can be made that high data density does not imply that a graphic will be good, nor one with low density bad, it doe...

"Another key element in making informative graphs is to avoid confounding design variation with data variation. This means that changes...

"In the laws of probability theory, likelihood distributions are fixed properties of a hypothesis. In the art of rationality, to explai...

"Of course, we know the laws of trial and error, of large numbers and probabilities. We know that these laws are part of the mathematic...

"Once more, an invariably-recurring lesson of geological history, at whatever point its study is taken up: the lesson of the almost inf...

"One feature [...] which requires much more justification than is usually given, is the setting up of unplausible null hypotheses. For ...

"Another reason for the applied statistician to care about Bayesian inference is that consumers of statistical answers, at least interv...