#mathematics

For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics? ↗

— Richard Courant

#alike #alone #answer #experience #itself

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#delight #exaltation #excellence #found #highest

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#defined #know #mathematics #may #never

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#because #god #human #i #like

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#absolute necessity #actual #conform #every #into

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. ↗

— Godfrey Harold Hardy

#first #mathematics #permanent #place #test

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius. ↗

— Marston Morse

#genius #madness #mathematics #same #servant

When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring. ↗

— Farkas Bolyai

#mathematics #politics #science #thought #science

Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'what is.' Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'how to' . ↗

— Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman

#mathematics #sicp #science

...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#free-will #mathematics