10 Quotes by David Mumford

Everyone knows that physicists are concerned with the laws of the universe and have the audacity sometimes to think they have discovered the choices God made when He created the universe in thus and such a pattern. Mathematicians are even more audacious. What they feel they discover are the laws that God Himself could not avoid having to follow.

The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

A Noah’s Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, ‘Almost All Children Left Behind.’

Images of the world are Renormalization Group fixed points.

The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.

I think that mathematics can benefit by acknowledging that the creation of good models is just as important as proving deep theorems.

The world is a very complicated place, as babies know.

Logic has virtually nothing to do with the way we think.