God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.
Life is more fun if you play games.
The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.
Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.
Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.
In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.
The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.
One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
Our text-books have lately arrived at such perfection as to render explanations and lectures from the instructor altogether superfluous…
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
In the minds of perhaps a majority of persons, education still consists in the acquiring of certain facilities for particular purposes in life. But this does not deserve the name of education. A system of instruction adapted merely to this purpose, enslaves and degrades human nature. It reduces men to machines, by bringing up workmen for a manufactory…
The mind of the child is considered a mere receptacle, which is to be stored with knowledge. Its pliability is abused into a mechanical and spiritless routine… for in receiving knowledge, the pupil is merely passive.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.
We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.