Spatial Reasoning Quotes

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.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.

Algebras deal not with laws of number, but with such laws of the human thinking machinery as have been discovered in the course of investigations on numbers. Plane geometry deals with such laws of thought as were discovered by men intent on finding out how to measure surface; and solid geometry with such additional laws of thought as were discovered when men began to extend geometry into three dimensions.

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation.

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures.

We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.

Geometry enlightlens the intellect and sets one's mind right

We come now to the question: what is a priori certain or necessary, respectively in geometry (doctrine of space) or its foundations? Formerly we thought everything; nowadays we think nothing. Already the distance-concept is logically arbitrary; there need be no things that correspond to it, even approximately.

Geometry enlightens the intellect and sets one's mind right. All of its proofs are very clear and orderly. It is hardly possible for errors to enter into geometrical reasoning, because it is well arranged and orderly. Thus, the mind that constantly applies itself to geometry is not likely to fall into error. In this convenient way, the person who knows geometry acquires intelligence.

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.

Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.

The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular.

Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.

I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.

There are all sorts of things embodied in the Lego brick - geometry and mathematics and truth and proportion and shape and colour... It is a faintly spiritual activity that everybody connects with.

Basically, I'm a bit of a nerd and I've always wanted to solve a Rubik's Cube.

Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

I remember, at MIT, we had to write an essay about something mathematical that you do in your extra time. I basically wrote about how dance, to me, was geometry: it was all shapes.

That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads." "That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.

I've always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early '80s.

I'm Tetris, Silas. All my pieces and parts are going to fit into all of your pieces and parts.