Percy W. Bridgman Quotes

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.

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.

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.

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.

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.

God made integers, all else is the work of man.

I really love numbers.

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.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

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

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

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

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

Number, the most excellent of all inventions.

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.

317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

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.