Decimals Quotes:

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.

- Sri Aurobindo

source: Sri Aurobindo (1994). “Gems from Sri Aurobindo, 2nd Series”, p.136, Lotus Press

topic: Life, Age, Born, Reborn, Decimals

I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.

- Bill Nye

source: "Bill Nye the Science Guy: Don't Worry, Your Phone Isn't Making You Dumb". Interview with Wilson Rothman, gizmodo.com. March 19, 2010.

topic: Real, Fall, Black And White, Decimals

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

- William Gilmore Simms

topic: Believe, Humor, Economist, Decimals

Counting in octal is just likst counting in decimal--if you don't use your thumbs.

- Tom Lehrer

topic: Thumbs, Use, Counting, Decimals

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

- Brian Selznick

source: Brian Selznick (2015). “Wonderstruck”, p.221, Scholastic

topic: Book, World, Able, Decimals

I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

source: Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.301, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Wall, Science, Numbers, Decimals, Tall Buildings

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

topic: Memories, Writing, Lines, Matchsticks, Decimals

The Dewey decimal system really works. So that's all I needed to know. Elementary school taught me that.

- Michelle Rodriguez

topic: School, Taught, Elementary School, Decimals

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

- Daniel Tammet

source: Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

topic: Beautiful, Unique, Symphony, Mona Lisa, Decimals

He wished he was with his mom in her library, where everything was safe and numbered and organized by the Dewey decimal system. Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for, like the meaning of your dream, or your dad.

- Brian Selznick

source: Brian Selznick (2015). “Wonderstruck”, p.221, Scholastic

topic: Mom, Dream, Dad, Decimals

Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don't), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong.

- Richard Dawkins

topic: Real, Heaven, World, Decimals, Real World

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

- Sylvia Plath

topic: Numbers, Perfectly Good, Gold, Abbreviations, Decimals

Part of my job is to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.

- Neal Shusterman

topic: Jobs, Book, Kids, Organized Mind, Decimals

I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.

- Agatha Christie

source: Agatha Christie (1991). “Agatha Christie: An Autobiography”, Berkley Publishing Group

topic: Education, Father, Math, Decimals

... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.

- James Clerk Maxwell

topic: Men, Years, Occupation, Decimals

There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…” Uncle Will frowned. “Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?” “No. But I can recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.” “I weep for the future.” “There’s where the martinis come in.

- Libba Bray

topic: Uncles, Book, School, Decimals, Hideous

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

- Will Durant

source: "The Case for India". Book by Will Durant, 1930.

topic: Philosophy, India, Chess, Decimals, Numerals

The standard model gives us an accuracy of ten decimal digits, this is an amazing success that has never been achieved before in science.

- Nathan Seiberg

topic: Science, Giving, Mathematics, Decimals

All we know about the world teaches us that the effects of A and B are always different-in some decimal place-for any A and B. Thus asking "are the effects different?" is foolish.

- John Tukey

topic: Different, Asking, World, Decimals

Ten decimal places of π are sufficient to give the circumference of the earth to a fraction of an inch, and thirty decimal places would give the circumference of the visible universe to a quantity imperceptible to the most powerful microscope.

- Simon Newcomb

topic: Powerful, Giving, Earth, Decimals

It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities.

- David Elkind

source: David Elkind (1995). “TIES THAT STRESS”, p.131, Harvard University Press

topic: Children, Teaching, Mean, Decimals, Centeredness

For the record, do I know anyone not a demon or a freak?” – Nick “Yes, you do. Not sure if Bubba and Mark go into the latter or not, though. I’m too tired to mentally categorize them. You figure it out, and I’ll go with your Dewey decimal.” – Caleb

- Sherrilyn Kenyon

source: Sherrilyn Kenyon (2016). “Chronicles of Nick”, p.497, St. Martin's Griffin

topic: Tired, Records, Freak, Decimals, Caleb

It seemed as though the main framework had been put together once and for all, and that little remained to be done but to measure physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal point.

- William Cecil Dampier

source: William Cecil Dampier Dampier-Whetham M.A., F.R.S. (1931). “A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy & Religion”

topic: Together, Littles, Measurement, Decimals

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent.

- Randall Jarrell

topic: Believe, Writing, Two, Surrealist, Decimals

I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.

- Daniel Tammet

topic: Numbers, Mind, Shapes, Decimals

It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.

- Henri Poincare

topic: Mean, Perfect, Too Late, Decimals

Black folks are judged by quantity, not quality. It's a decimal point or figure. How different is that from slavery? There's no moral code, it's just about successful business for America.

- Chuck D

source: Source: www.motherjones.com

topic: Successful, America, Black, Decimals, Moral Code

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

- Jay Griffiths

source: " The 'leap second' is a timely reminder" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

topic: Space, Example, Needs, Decimals, Calibration

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

- Robert A. Heinlein

topic: Stars, Truth, Thinking, Wishful Thinking, Divine Revelation