“It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. …When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. …In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality…”

New Theories of Everything (2007)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. …When viewed in this way, it is inevi…" by John D. Barrow?
John D. Barrow photo
John D. Barrow 58
British scientist 1952–2020

Related quotes

Jim Peebles photo

“I don't think there is a final theory of anything. It's theories all the way down.”

Jim Peebles (1935) Canadian-American astronomer

[Princeton news conference for James Peeble, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, October 8, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiPZrRcdgfU] (quote at 25:26 of 38:15)

G. H. Hardy photo
Nima Arkani-Hamed photo

“Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way.”

Nima Arkani-Hamed (1972) American-Canadian physicist

[#qotd #quote of the day #IASIdeas, twitter.com, 12 July 2018, https://twitter.com/the_ias/status/1017439929985634304?lang=en] (9:05 AM)

“In many ways it is true to say that syntax is mathematical logic, semantics is philosophy or philosophy of science, and pragmatics is psychology, but these fields are not really all distinct.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.42 as cited in: Sica Pettigiani (1996) La comunicazione interumana. p.48

Hermann Grassmann photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
John Allen Paulos photo

“The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. In Greek, mathematics simply meant learning, and we have adapted this... to define the term as "learing to decide."”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa.

C. West Churchman, Leonard Auerbach, Simcha Sadan, Thinking for Decisions: Deductive Quantitative Methods (1975) Preface.
1960s - 1970s

Jodi Picoult photo

Related topics