David Berlinski Quotes

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Programming is all about numbers.

I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. . . I am quite willing to believe that anything in deductive logic can be done by machinery.

From the time I was 7, when I purchased my first calculator, I was fascinated by the idea of a machine that could compute things.

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Calculating does not equal mathematics. It's a subsection of it. In years gone by it was the limiting factor, but computers now allow you to make the whole of mathematics more intellectual.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

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

You don't have to be a genius mathematician to have a career in cyber security, but it certainly helps to be a strong mathematician.

Mathematics is a logical method. . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

The autodecrement is not magical.

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists of the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate all need for intelligent thought.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.