Mathematical Obsession Quotes

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

After I had my dream, I got into numerology. Like my buddy's name is Bill, and I would say, "B is a two, and each I is a nine, and the L's are fours. And that's eight." I would figure out everybody's numerological single-digit number.

Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.

Number theorists are like lotus-eaters -- having once tasted of this food they can never give it up.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.

Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.

Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these calculations [of Pi], having no other business at the time