Thoughts on Mathematics and
Philosophy.
Then, my noble friend, geometry will
draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up
that which is not unhappily allowed to fall down.
Plato
The primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.
Aristotle
Today, it is not only that our kings do not know mathematics, but our
philosophers do not know mathematics.
Julius Robert
Oppenheimer
Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good
philosopher is at least half a mathematician.
Gottlob
Frege
A marvelous neutrality have these things Mathematical, and also a strange
participation between things supernatural, immortal, intellectual, simple, and
indivisible and things natural, mortal, sensible, compounded, and divisible.
John Dee
Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six
days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because
this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the
six days did not exist.
Saint Augustine
of Hippo
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical
statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" . . . and so we find that
we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths.
Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem
of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability
to capture all with language and symbol - all have their counterparts in the
quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.
John D.
Barrow
Geometry existed before the creation.
Plato
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact
the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense;
they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical
language.
Werner
Heisenberg
Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on
mankind.
Thomas
Hobbes
Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is
so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in
every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.
Rene
Descartes
Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
Rene
Descartes
We cannot take anything for granted, beyond the first mathematical formula.
Question everything else.
Maria
Mitchell
He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.
Plato
Mathematics is the handwriting on the human consciousness of the very Spirit of
Life itself.
Claude
Bragdon
The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of
man.
David
Hilbert
God ever geometrizes.
Plato
God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the devil exists since we
cannot prove the consistency.
Morris Kline
[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.
William
Wordsworth
What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learned as a task but to
be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before
the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.
Bertrand
Russell
To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good
mathematician.
Bertrand
Russell
It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any
universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to
mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical
significance.
Bertrand
Russell
From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only
all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and
organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within
the magic circle of mathematical formulae.
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that
it has never tried to contact us.
Bill
Watterson
