Marcus du Sautoy Quotes

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers …. People are getting from A to B and it's not clear how they are getting there....

I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

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 only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.

But actually a code is a language for translating one thing into another. And mathematics is the language of science. My big thesis is that although the world looks messy and chaotic, if you translate it into the world of numbers and shapes, patterns emerge and you start to understand why things are the way they are.

The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos.

God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.

You'll never hear me talk about stats.

I'm not too worried about stats and stuff like that.

If we just focus on stats, we're gonna eventually not have them.

I always liked numbers.

I've never been a stat guy.

Networks love data. They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work.

To learn something from your data, the forming of a hypothesis lies with the human being, which turns into a query, which becomes a result. The problem is that there are too many queries to make, too many questions to ask.

Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

You're an entropic chaos factor

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.