David Berlinski Quotes

"Any idiot," he said calmly but with immense conviction, "can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience."

It is here, at this very moment when the first utterly trivial differential equation is solved, that the secret form of words is revealed that makes modern science possible.

The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.

Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say.
“Remember me.”

A mathematical argument, once understood, is in its capacity to compel belief a miracle of enlightened life.

Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after they have been completed, I am where I started, having done something but accomplished little, a useful metaphor for a great many activities in life.

In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that <math>\sqrt{3}</math> + <math>\sqrt{12}</math> = <math>3\sqrt{3},</math> an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances.