Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

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

The concept of number is the obvious distinction between the beast and man. Thanks to number, the cry becomes a song, noise acquires rhythm, the spring is transformed into a dance, force becomes dynamic, and outlines figures.

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.

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

To the pure geometer the radius of curvature is an incidental characteristic - like the grin of the Cheshire cat. To the physicist it is an indispensable characteristic. It would be going too far to say that to the physicist the cat is merely incidental to the grin. Physics is concerned with interrelatedness such as the interrelatedness of cats and grins. In this case the "cat without a grin" and the "grin without a cat" are equally set aside as purely mathematical phantasies.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

He who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day...needs to reorganize his life

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

Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

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.

We need more Christians who take their place alongside believing and unbelieving neighbors in the daily gift exchange

The introduction of numbers as coordinates by reference to the particular division scheme of the open one-dimensional continuum is an act of violence whose only practical vindication is the special calculatory manageability of the ordinary number continuum with its four basic operations.

Yes, but you need to learn your maths." "I don't need to, really. I already know how to count to a hundred. And I'm sure I'll never need ore than a hundred of anything.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

This has been done elegantly by Minkowski; but chalk is cheaper than grey matter, and we will do it as it comes.

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.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.