Skip to content

John D. Barrow on Mathematics

1952–2020 England

← All quotes by John D. Barrow

3 quotes

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

The Artful Universe (1995)

Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer.

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics. Once that germ of rationality and order exists to turn a chaos into a cosmos, then so does mathematics. There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers.

The Artful Universe (1995)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John D. Barrow (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.