The Math Book Quotes

“It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“In this book, you will encounter various interesting geometries that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested that "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) modeled the solar system with Platonic solids such as the dodecahedron. In the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) was impressed with the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Large Lie groups, like E8-which is discussed in the entry "The Quest for Lie Group E8 (2007)"- may someday help us create a unified theory of physics. in 2007, Swedish American cosmologist Max Tegmark published both scientific and popular articles on the mathematical universe hypothesis, which states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure-in other words, our universe in not just described by mathematics-it is mathematics.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“According to his controversial theory, we notice the tops of the waves, but beneath the surface some kind of synchronistic mechanism may exist that mysteriously connects events in our world and causes them to cluster.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Georges Ifrah in the Universal History of Numbers discusses simultaneity when writing about Mayan mathematics:

We therefore see yet again how people who have been widely separated in time or space have...been led to very similar if not identical results....In some cases, the explanation for this may be found in contacts and influences between different groups of people....The true explanation lies in what we have previously referred to as the profound unity of culture: the intelligence of Homo sapiens is universal and its potential is remarkably uniform in all parts of the world.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Ancient people, like the Greeks, had a deep fascination with numbers. Could it be that in difficult times numbers were the only constant thing in an ever shifting world? To the Pythagoreans, an ancient Greek sect, numbers were tangible, immutable, comfortable, eternal, more reliable than friends, less threatening than Apollo and Zeus.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics