[first lines] Helinger: Mathematicians won the war. Mathematicians broke the Japanese codes... and built the A-bomb. Mathematicians... like you. The stated goal of the Soviets is global Communism. In medicine or economics, in technology or space, bat...
Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is-- so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest ma...
Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pyth...
Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations.
[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average le...
What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it beca...
Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.
A good problem is something you don't know how to solve. That's what makes it a good puzzle and a good opportunity.
[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it is probable, since the sensational triumphs of Einstein, that stellar astronomy and ato...
[Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.
All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backw...
If teaching is reduced to mere data transmission, if there is no sharing or excitement and wonder, if teachers themselves are passive recipients of information and not creators of new ideas, what hope is there for their students?
Mathematicians are born, not made.
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
I don't see how it's doing society any good to have it's members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them.
Mathematics is written for mathematicians.
God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.
I'm no mathematician, so I'm stuck with the graphic representations.
Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.
Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.
