“Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.””
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003)
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John Derbyshire 27
writer 1945Related quotes

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The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway.
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Trump speaking while signing an Executive Order on the National Space Council https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/30/remarks-president-signing-executive-order-national-space-council (30 June 2017)
2010s, 2017, June