John Maynard Smith Quotes

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.

Convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking.

Mathematics is the gate and key to science.

Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.

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

Reasons come first. Answers come second

Thus you see, most noble Sir, how this type of solution to the Königsberg bridge problem bears little relationship to mathematics, and I do not understand why you expect a mathematician to produce it, rather than anyone else, for the solution is based on reason alone, and its discovery does not depend on any mathematical principle.

Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures.

I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play.

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.

I was just kind of doing the math.

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Pooh looked at his two paws. He knew that one of them was the right, and he knew that when you had decided which one of them was the right, then the other one was the left, but he never could remember how to begin.

Chess makes man wiser and clear-sighted.

Give me a blackboard. I can stop anything on a blackboard.

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.

I'm a logic monster, if things don't make sense I gotta make sense of them.

Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

Programming is all about numbers.

Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.