Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What is math?

That joke works better with the square root of negative one, not sqrt(-2), though, IMHO, so that each participant has (morally ;-) just one of the faults alluded to. Poor sqt(-2) has both, breaking the balance of the joke.

My offerings are paraphrasesof things that were told to me as a child, which still seem true:

Mathematics is the king of the arts and the queen of the sciences.

Maths is the art of being lazy - mathematicians are always on the look out for an easier way to work things out, and much of maths has been developed for this purpose.

Maths is fun!

Math is the secret language of the universe.

Math is joy!

Whatever you choose, I would translate my answer into binary.

1 reason i love math is bcause its 2 hrd to txt wthout all th3 numbers math gives us. B4 i had 2 lern 5pelling + 6rammer. 7 really didnt 83L13VE the letters were all that gr8 to talk with. Mr. Google says
a2+b2=c2, am i right?

Maths is endless fun!

How about?

Maths teaches us that there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't

To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: What is math? "I know it when I see it."

I don't have any good answer because this just gave me flashbacks to my freshman year algebra II class where we spent the first quarter on answering the question "What is 9?" The teacher rejected every answer the class could come up with. I never found out the answer that the teacher was looking for because I ended up transferring sections for the rest of the year.

“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

He was so close yet so wrong. The mother art of course is math. Without math, we will have no architecture.

This made me smile.