How to Use formalism in a Sentence

formalism

noun

• From one point of view, quantum physics is just a set of formalisms, a useful tool kit.
  — James Gleick, New York Times, 8 May 2018
• Despite all its formalism, math is not meant to have sacred texts that only the priests can read.
  — Quanta Magazine, 10 Oct. 2019
• That formalism and abstraction corrupts the rest of us.
  — Samuel Goldman, The Week, 3 Dec. 2021
• Refreshingly, the formalism of this new work is rarely cold.
  — Los Angeles Times, 16 June 2021
• The Supreme Court of the United States performs its duties with a theatrical formalism.
  — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Nov. 2019
• That sort of structural formalism is a part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don’t have better ideas.
  — Ben Yagoda, WSJ, 1 Sep. 2017
• And running ribbon-like through the formalism is a familiar story: that of a girl, born to poor parents in a Norman town.
  — Tobi Haslett, Harper's Magazine, 18 Sep. 2023
• The papers, which ran to more than 500 pages, were written in a novel formalism and contained many new terms and definitions.
  — Quanta Magazine, 21 Dec. 2015
• Democracy may have been reduced to a crude civic formalism, but many are still fighting for a democratic life.
  — Blair McClendon, The New Republic, 19 Jan. 2021
• The advance laid the groundwork for the entire formalism of black hole thermodynamics.
  — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 14 Mar. 2018
• Bell was a proponent of formalism, a school of thought that places beauty and artistic merit within the properties of an object.
  — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 6 July 2011
• From concert halls to cabarets, French composers and their American counterparts created new works that ran the gamut from cool formalism to le jazz hot.
  — Georgia Rowe, The Mercury News, 17 Mar. 2017
• But in his work, and apparently in his life as well, Johns lived out a hard, self-denying ethos that is common among artists who stress formalism over all else: that the artist must disappear into the work.
  — Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2021
• There’s no assumption about how that happens: how the quantum formalism must be used to predict the probabilities of the outcomes.
  — Quanta Magazine, 13 Feb. 2019
• There’s a stilted formalism to its aesthetic that feels as tightly wound up as its protagonist (and its lead actor), for better and for worse.
  — Manuel Betancourt, Variety, 30 Mar. 2023
• As a choreographer, José Limón was full of emotion: Sterile formalism was never his thing.
  — Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 3 May 2017
• Call it post-zombie or born-again formalism: this young artist’s paintings remind us of abstraction’s reason for being.
  — Ryan Sullivan, The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
• The cinematography is a little more anonymous than the cool, blanched formalism that Dupieux usually delivers, but the editing picks up the slack.
  — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 11 Feb. 2022
• This is an early appeal to ideas of artistic formalism that would later triumph in abstraction.
  — Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 14 July 2022
• The film is also sort of a lush set piece; with the dad’s northern California winery aesthetic juxtaposed against the prim formalism of the mom’s London sitting rooms.
  — Vogue, 17 July 2023
• The formalism of Thom Browne’s suiting might not seem analogous to the freedom and fury of the sports world, but Browne’s great strength as a designer is the ability to seamlessly shift between strict and spirited.
  — Steff Yotka, Vogue, 30 Oct. 2018
• The result, alas, doesn’t live up to the promise of the occasion, turning the character’s journey into fodder for a sluggish exercise in formalism.
  — Jon Frosch, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2022
• Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard, thinks the way that the subject is taught—with an emphasis on formalism, rather than human dynamics—could be part of the problem.
  — The Economist, 16 Dec. 2017
• Throughout her career, Ms. Mayer rejected formalism for the avant-garde.
  — Alex Williams, New York Times, 4 Dec. 2022
• Aharonov’s approach is called the two-state-vector formalism (TSVF) of quantum mechanics, and postulates quantum events are in some sense determined by quantum states not just in the past—but also in the future.
  — Philip Ball, Scientific American, 21 May 2018
• Its ironic tone sets aside formalism and complex narratives to allow for the naturalness and simplicity of the characters and its plots to shine.
  — Anna Marie De La Fuente, Variety, 20 Sep. 2021
• Salterini says contemporary dance is the bringing together the formalism and bravado of ballet, the earthiness of modern dance and the rhythms and syncopation of jazz dance.
  — Diana Dunbar, miamiherald, 17 Apr. 2018
• Several experts agreed that real numbers don’t seem to be physically real, and that physicists need a new formalism that doesn’t rely on them.
  — Quanta Magazine, 7 Apr. 2020
• It is almost assumed that the static camera does not allow that sensitivity, as if falling into a formalism.
  — Emiliano Granada, Variety, 21 Feb. 2022
• My neighbor’s gardener, favoring a greater formalism, allied himself with André Le Nôtre, the genius of Versailles.
  — Kieran Dodds; Text By Peter Ross, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Oct. 2020

Last Updated: 27 Jun 2024