The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing.[Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862]

Algebra is numbers forgetting why they’re letters.

So what if I don’t learn algebra?”Someday schools will be open again,’ Mom said. ‘Things will be normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.”That’s never going to happen,’ Jon said....

Thor again tutored me in the seventh grade, when I was learning Algebra. Algebra was quite an experience for me. Thor spent countless hours with me, because it was very hard for me to grasp...

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis,...

She has a body for years, and I have an astronaut tan. When we make love it will be like (x + 2)(2x -1) = 0, solve for x.

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan’s work, [George Andrews] said at another time, “I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package.

Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say...

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...

I wouldn’t have minded school if they taught you important things like how to have good sex and what brand of wine is the best… But for some reason they were hell bent on teaching...

He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by...

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it...

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.

On Algebra – “We’re a month into it, and I’m planning to start a real protest movement, one to have X and Y removed from the alphabet. Z is also suspect as far as I’m...

eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.

As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra....

Art is fire plus algebra.

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.