Bertrand Russell Quotes

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

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

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.

It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

An ounce of algebra is worth of a ton of verbal argument.

In math, you're either right or you're wrong.

I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.

Mathematics is entirely free in its development, and its concepts are only linked by the necessity of being consistent, and are co-ordinated with concepts introduced previously by means of precise definitions.

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.

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

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means.

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered.

Mathematical Reasoning is not only exact; it has its own criteria of reality.

All science requires mathematics.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

Kurt Godel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental - indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. ... The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Godel's achievement.