21 Quotes by John Allen Paulos

I think, therefore I laugh.

First, take a deep breath. Assume Shakespeare’s account is accurate and Julius Caesar gasped “You too, Brutus” before breathing his last. What are the chances you just inhaled a molecule which Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? The surprising answer is that, with probability better than 99 percent, you did just inhale such a molecule.

This tendency to personalize is, as we’ll see, a characteristic of many people who suffer from innumeracy. Equally typical is a tendency to equate the risk from some obscure and exotic malady with the chances of suffering from heart and circulatory disease, from which about 12,000 Americans die each week.

The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.

Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he’s lived in the state his whole life, replies, “Not yet.”

The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid’s first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.

The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the astrology column seem factual by comparison.

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity! – Isaac Asimov.

The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.