“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

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Joyce Carol Oates89

American author 1938

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“We can now return to the distinction between language and symbolism. A symbol is language and yet not language. A mathematical or logical or any other kind of symbol is invented to serve a purpose purely scientific; it is supposed to have no emotional expressiveness whatever. But when once a particular symbolism has been taken into use and mastered, it reacquires the emotional expressiveness of language proper. Every mathematician knows this. At the same time, the emotions which mathematicians find expressed in their symbols are not emotions in general, they are the peculiar emotions belonging to mathematical thinking.”

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“The unnaturalness of mathematical symbolism is attested to by history. The algebra of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Arabs was what is commonly called rhetorical algebra. …on the whole they used ordinary rhetoric to describe their mathematical work. Symbolism is a relatively modern invention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…”

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“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

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Joyce Carol Oates89

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