Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

The one [the logician] studies the science of drawing conclusions, the other [the mathematician] the science which draws necessary conclusions.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

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

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

There can never be surprises in logic.

Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.

Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

The Syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over-hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure. Our only hope therefore lies in a true induction.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.

I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.

Programming is all about numbers.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

Facts - behind them lies the whole fabric of deductive truth.

You’re not exempt from math if you’re a Republican, and you’re not exempt from math if you’re a Democrat. You’re not exempt from math if you’re a liberal, and you’re not exempt from math if you’re a conservative. You still have to do math.

Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.