John Derbyshire Quotes

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

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

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

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

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

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

Math is my favorite subject. It's the universal language. I like the fact that wherever you go in the whole world, two plus two will still be four.

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.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

And what are these fluxions? The velocities of evanescent increments. And what are these same evanescent increments? They are neither finite quantities, nor quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities...?

Numbers are limits, and perfection doesn't have limits.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.

Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined.

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 commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

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.

Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.

Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.