Richard Preston Quotes

As a child it was clear to me that in some sense math was in the world around us. I became fascinated by what this means. When you look at the shape of the sun and the moon, they're circles, so every time you see a circular thing, there's pi embedded in it.

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.

Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Math is my favorite subject. It's the universal language. I like the fact that wherever you go in the whole world, two plus two will still be four.

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

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

Transcendental [numbers], They transcend the power of algebraic methods.

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

I was very into math and calculus, and just always was very - really interested in that. But any sort of numbers.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but ' vector ' is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

What is algebra exactly; is it those three-cornered things?

A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

My basic mathematics is rather weak, so when some of the theories are broken into equations, I get rather lost.

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.