The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.

Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there.

The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don't have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won't be able to do.

You know, I'm not terribly fast at my times tables, because that's not what I think mathematics is about.

Theory is needed to tell you where to look.

Primes are the atoms of the arithmetic - the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

I'm obviously attuned to pick up mathematics whenever I can see it. But in Mozart there is a lot of conscious use of mathematical symbolism and numbers in order to try and give messages.

If you can make yourself symmetrical, you're sending out a sign that you've got good genes, you've got a good upbringing and therefore you'll make a good mate.

They are not kidding when they say that mothers are strong women. We need to be strong in more ways than our children will ever know.

When big-time blunders occur in any workplace, the boss or bosses usually are at fault, not clerks or secretaries or salespeople. Not reporters, the buck stops with the boss.

Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!

God must love the rich or he wouldn't divide so much among so few of them.

I have very old-fashioned tastes.

Whatever is natural admits of variety.

The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

A cookbook must have recipes, but it shouldn't be a blueprint. It should be more inspirational; it should be a guide.