Bertrand Russell Quotes

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

Mathematics - the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to human affairs.

It is indeed a surprising and fortunate fact that nature can be expressed by relatively low-order mathematical functions.

Logical investigations can obviously be a useful tool for philosophy. They must, however, be informed by a sensitivity to the philosophical significance of the formalism and by a generous admixture of common sense, as well as a thorough understanding both of the basic concepts and of the technical details of the formal material used. It should not be supposed that the formalism can grind out philosophical results in a manner beyond the capacity of ordinary philosophical reasoning. There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy.

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.

I thought I wanted to be a physicist in high school until I learned that there was much more math than philosophy in it. I assumed I would just sit around all day and think.

... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

Oh, figures!' answered Ned. 'You can make figures do whatever you want.

More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional [religious] beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. That is why it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make [people] kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.

[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.

Math is the language of the universe.

Math was my big interest when I was in prep school. I was considering taking math in college, and majoring in it.

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.