Mathematical Paradox Quotes

The half is greater than the whole.

One plus one equals both.

Are you such a dreamer To put the world to rights? I'll stay home forever Where two and two always makes a five I'll lay down the tracks Sandbag and hide January has April's showers And two and two always makes a five It's the devil's way now There is no way out You can SCREAM and you can shout It is too late now Because... You have not been Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! Payin' attention! You have not been paying attention!

It is hard to know what you are talking about in mathematics, yet no one questions the validity of what you say. There is no other realm of discourse half so queer.

There is a theorem that colloquially translates, You cannot comb the hair on a bowling ball. ... Clearly, none of these mathematicians had Afros, because to comb an Afro is to pick it straight away from the scalp. If bowling balls had Afros, then yes, they could be combed without violation of mathematical theorems.

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

I’m so tired... I was up all night trying to round off infinity.

My father could argue two sides of a Möbius Strip.

But I was thinking of a way To multiply by ten, And always, in the answer, get The question back again.

A zero itself is nothing, but without a zero you cannot count anything; therefore, a zero is something, yet zero.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.

It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist.

According to the celestial multiplication table, once one is three, and three times one is one, and according to heavenly subtraction if we take two from three, three are left. The addition is equally peculiar, if we add two to one we have but one. Each one is equal to himself and the other two.