41 Quotes by Marcus du Sautoy

Some might question whether it makes sense to talk about setting up the experiment and running it again with exactly the same conditions--that it is, in fact, impossible. Locally, you might get the conditions exactly the same, but you have to embed the experiment in the universe, and that has moved on. You can't rewind the wave function of the universe and rerun it. The universe is a one-time-only experiment that includes us as part of its wave function, and there's no going back.

One of the most curious consequences of quantum physics is that a particle like an electron can seemingly be in more than one place at the same time until it is observed, at which point there seems to be a random choice made about where the particle is really located. Scientists currently believe that this randomness is genuine, not just caused by a lack of information. Repeat the experiment under the same conditions and you may get a different answer each time.

For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.

Mathematics has beauty and romance. It’s not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It’s an extraordinary place; it’s worth spending time there.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can’t do in the real world.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

The point is with good maths skills you have just wonderful opportunities and if you don’t have good maths skills, there are just so many things that you won’t be able to do.

When people ask me what my religion is, I say its the Arsenal.

Primes are the atoms of the arithmetic – the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers.