Chipping away at gigantic unproved postulates. Investigating the properties of common whole numbers and ending up in the wilds of analysis. Intoxicating theorems. Nagging little symmetries. The secrets hidden deep inside the great big primes. The way one formula or number or expression keeps turning up in the most unexpected places. The infinite. The infinitesimal. […]
Number Quotes
Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.
Lots of people can’t count to 10. They are usually the ones in front of you of you in the supermarket express lane.
When you have mastered the numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading a book. You will be reading meanings.
To think that two and two are four, And neither five nor three, The heart of man has long been sore, And long ’tis like to be.
To non-European civilizations the ideas that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power seems never to have occurred.
The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful resource of the human spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being.
‘Perfect numbers’ certainly never did any good, but then they never did any particular harm.
It’s really not a number I’m terribly interested in. (When asked about the number of Iraqi people who died in the 1991 “Desert Storm” campaign)
Numbers constitute the only universal language.
