Martin Gardner Quotes
In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance.
All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
The sudden hunch, the creative leap of mind that "sees" in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence.
A surprising proportion of mathematicians are accomplished musicians. Is it because music and mathematics share patterns that are beautiful?
As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun.
In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.
The universe is almost like a huge magic trick and scientists are trying to figure out how it does what it does.
A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.
Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it.
Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.
The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.
We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains