Daniel Tammet Quotes

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations.

Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It's a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.

You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.

From 'Embracing the Wide Sky', I went to the States, to Canada and to different parts of Europe as well. I gave interviews in several languages.

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

I'm inconsistent because I'm human.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

I'm not sure I'm the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don't know very many of the others.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.

I feel traveling certainly does broaden the mind. In my case certainly I feel more confident. It gives you a new perspective on the world.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year.

Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view.