I'm fortunate enough to be friends and personally acquainted with some of the leading mathematicians of our age, but... I have never met a genius. Th… - Tadashi Tokieda

Different cultures... until recently, used... science in different styles... [M]athematics, which is supposed to be the most universal of these... If you do zoology or geology or things like that which are geographically constrained, different countries might so things differently, but mathematics is... as universal as any human endeavor can get... [N]onetheless... the Russians... write and think about mathematics in a way very different from how Americans thought and wrote, and the French wrote... and thought mathematics in a way very different from how the Japanese did, and so on... [Y]ou can tell instantly which school, which culture, it came from.

[J]ust as many people... correctly worry about biodiversity, I get... emotional and upset... whenever linguistic diversity in particular, and cultural diversity in general, decreases... is threatened... [T]he history of evolution tells us that... you get interesting diversity and... life forms because of . Whenever diversity decreases and one single species or... idea or... way of doing things starts taking over, usually the world is headed for destruction. ...Monkeys that call themselves humans might do some optimization calculations... in their foolishness, and they say, "Oh, ...we have times this ...and that means we have to do it this way. Everyone should be behaving this way..." and so on... [T]hen they end up doing this and in some sense the invention of money doomed us to go in that direction. But I do believe that that way lies madness. ...[F]or me, madness means you abandoned diversity and ...everyone started running in the same direction, and that's really dangerous. So I am... a great partisan of people doing things their own cultural ways, and I don't want, for example, English to take over the entire world.

The study of languages, some... call it linguistics, but the nuance is quite different. Linguistics, since especially Chomsky and that school, became very... analytical and almost mathematical, and so I'm absolutely not interested in or... an analytical study of languages. ...I'm a mathematician, and if I wanted to that... I'll just do... straight mathematics... [I]nstead, philology in the glory days of the 19th century meant primarily the reconstruction of the Indo-European family. So people knew lots and lots of languages, and their peculiarities, and their accidentals and evolution in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit... [I]t was practiced outside the European family, for notably the Semitic family, especially languages that have a lot of written records that go way back, and you can do science. So that's what philology means and that's what they used to do, but I do emphasize that I'm... absolutely not interested in mathematical aspects of linguistics. I'm interested in the languages themselves.