Philip J. Davis famous quotes

03-28-2025

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Beautiful #Science #Way
Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Sunday #Weekdays #Statistics
In the realm of ideas, of mental objects, those ideas whose properties are reproducible are called mathematical objects, and the study of mental objects with reproducible properties is called mathematics.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Ideas #Statistics #Study
The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Numbers #Helping #Catalyst
The inner circle of pure mathematicians will respond to the book with delight.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Book #Circles #Delight
Blindness to the aesthetic element in mathematics is widespread and can account for a feeling that mathematics is dry as dust, as exciting as a telephone book... Contrariwise, appreciation of this element makes the subject live in a wonderful manner and burn as no other creation of the human mind seems to do.
-- Philip J. Davis

#Appreciation #Book #Dust
One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists' war, World War II was the physicists' war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians' war.
-- Philip J. Davis

#War #World #May

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.
There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.
It's been a straight strip, I must tell you, I've enjoyed it all the way. If I'm saying things to make it sound like it's hard, hard work, it's not. It's beautiful work. It's fun work. It's everything you'd ever want to do.
If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
Whether statistics be an art or a science... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.
Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.
To justify God's ways to man.
I am officially Jewish, but Iâ€™m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.
You just can't let anything or anyone get in the way of who you are.

Philip J. Davis famous quotes

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