John Derbyshire Quotes

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

The square root of I is I.

Mathematics is written for mathematicians.

Without mathematics, there's nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.

I love math.

I have found a very great number of exceedingly beautiful theorems.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

I got good grades in math, but I never really enjoyed it. My favorite part of math was algebra, but geometry was the worst.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

I like science and mathematics. When I say mathematics, I don't mean algebra or math in that sense, but the mathematics of things.

Primes are the atoms of the arithmetic - the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.

One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

Squaring numbers are just like women. If they're under thirteen, just do them in your head.

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question.

Transcendental [numbers], They transcend the power of algebraic methods.

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. ... Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.