164 quotes found
“When he said someone had "died", Erds meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.”
“I am not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless I'm always saying that the SF( The SF is the supreme Fascist, the Number-One guy up there) has this transf...”
“...317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.”
“So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.”
“...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.”
“The number of God is Pi and Euler number is evil.”
“Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical tru...”
“Mathematics isnt just science, it is poetry our efforts to crystallise the unglimpsed connections between things. Poetry that bridges and magnifies the mysteries of the galaxy. But the signs and s...”
“The spirit of mathematics is not captured by spending 3 hours solving 20 look-alike homework problems. Mathematics is thinking, comparing, analyzing, inventing, and understanding. The main point is...”
“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”
“Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is generally studied only by advanced students of physics, but Albert had mastered it by the time he was sixteen years old.”
“Store speculates:Some creative people of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, ...”
“From now on whenever I read a math book, I'm going to try to figure out by myself how everything was done, before looking at the solution. Even if I don't figure it out, I think I'll be able to see...”
“It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic p...”
“And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.”
“I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.”
“Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. T...”
“Last period of the day. Charles had decided that morning that he would talk about tessellations. Last period, they should have been covering sines and cosines. They should have been starting to gra...”
“...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybodys time to think about it. So what do we do?In probability theory t...”
“Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.”
