“A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a ‘physicist’ and does ‘physics’ and physical experiments with abstract concepts.”

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

It is the definition of the word ‘object’ which destroys all religions.

My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong’s record of “West End Blues” for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records.

Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.

A mathematician makes plans to travel backwards in time through a wormhole to a parallel universe when he can’t even make it to Mars with the fastest rocket on hand today.

Whenever I want to represent or depict the official version, I will refer to them as ‘mathematicians’ or ‘mathematical physicists’ or idiots or something like that.

For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.

The mathematicians of this world regard themselves as ‘physicists,’ yet they know next to nothing about Physics.

Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.

A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic.

I didn’t feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

I didn’t want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure – I wanted to do something different.

Just learning how to read music requires metrics, and I think that helps you with mathematics. A lot of scientists and doctors have a musical background – it’s very interesting.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation.

Thus number may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.