“Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.”
Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician
Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 2, p. 41
“Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.”
As quoted in Comic Sections (1993) by D MacHale
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Norbert Wiener36
American mathematician 1894–1964Related quotes
Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician
Source: Space—Time—Matter (1952), Ch. 2 "The Metrical Continuum"
Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician
As quoted in The Century: A Popular Quarterly (1874) ed. Richard Watson Gilder, Vol. 7, pp. 508-509, https://books.google.com/books?id=ceYGAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA508 "Relations of Mathematics to Physics". Earlier quote without citation in Nature, Volume 8 (1873), page 450. <br class="br">Also quoted partially in Michael Grossman and Robert Katz, Calculus http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=216746186|Non-Newtonian (1972) p. iv. ISBN 0912938013.
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 6
Context: The evidence of the existence of other astral systems besides our own is much more decided than might be expected when we consider that the nearest of them must needs be placed at a mighty interval beyond our own.
Camille Paglia (1947) American writer
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 8
Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher
From a book review in The New York Times (9 May 1976) http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40F13FC345E157493CBA9178ED85F428785F9#, also quoted in The American Mathematical Monthly (December 1994) <br class="br">Context: Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.
Stephen Hawking book A Brief History of Time
Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 1
Context: It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.
