47 Quotes by Jordan Ellenberg

Nowadays, the Abrahamic argument – just look at everything, how could it all be so awesome if there weren’t a designer behind it? – has been judged wanting, at least in most scientific circles. But then again, now we have microscopes and telescopes and computers. We are not restricted to gaping at the moon from our cribs. We have data, lots of data, and we have the tools to mess with it.

To do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason.

A mathematician is always asking, “What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?

Mark Twain is good on this: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.

Mathematics, mostly, is a communal enterprise, each advance the product of a huge network of minds working toward a common purpose, even if we accord special honor to the person who places the last stone in the arch.

One of the great joys of mathematics is the incontrovertible feeling that you’ve understood something the right way, all the way down to the bottom; it’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in any other sphere of mental life. And when you know how to do something the right way, it’s hard-for some stubborn people, impossible-to make yourself explain it the wrong way.

We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.

It’s not always wrong to be wrong.

Big Data isn’t magic, and it doesn’t tell the feds who’s a terrorist and who’s not. But it doesn’t have to be magic to generate long lists of people who are in some ways red-flagged, elevated-risk, “people of interest.” Most of the people on those lists will have nothing to do with terrorism. How confident are you that you’re not one of them?