David Berlinski Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.

David Berlinski
The origin is a mathematical point, something that has sucked from the concept of a place its essential property, that of being here rather than there, the infinitely extended line itself balanced perfectly on that slim, solitary, and singular spike.

David Berlinski
No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

David Berlinski
A point, it must be remembered, is not a number; holding place without size and arising whimsically whenever two straight lines are crossed, it is a geometrical object, a kind of fathomless atom out of which the line is ultimately created.

David Berlinski
In the end, every scheme and every science is justified by itself or it is not justified at all.

David Berlinski
The motion of the mind is conveyed along a cloud of meaning.~ There is this paradox that we get to meaning only when we strip the meaning from symbols.

David Berlinski
The concepts of mathematics, despite their unfamiliarity, are infinitely accessible. At their deaths, those who have minded mathematics will have known the continuous functions better than the crooked human heart. That so abstract a consideration should in the end be so lucid is a source of wonder.

David Berlinski
There is no explaining mathematics without from time to time using mathematics, and the mathematician's symbolism, which to an outsider looks as inviting as Chinese.

David Berlinski
We are finite creatures, bound to this place and this time, and helpless before an endless expanse. It is within the calculus that for the first time the infinite is charmed into compliance, its luxuriance subordinated to the harsh concept of a limit.

David Berlinski
If science begins in awe as the eye extends itself throughout the cold of space, past the girdle of Orion and past the galaxies pinwheeling on their axes, then in the calculus mankind has created an instrument commensurate with its capacity to wonder.

David Berlinski
It is a fact. At some time or other the mathematicians of Europe looked out over the universe, noted its appalling clutter, and determined that on some level there must exist a simple representation of the world.

David Berlinski
If the calculus is much like a cathedral, its construction the work of centuries, it remained until the nineteenth century a cathedral suspiciously suspended in midair, the thing simply hanging there, with no one absolutely convinced that one day the gorgeous and elaborate structure would not come crashing down and fracture in a thousand pieces.

David Berlinski
The square root of 2 is like the Yeti or the Loch Ness monster, the snows of yesterday, the dusky ghost of the dusty window - it is not there, it cannot be found, it is not a part of the furniture of this or any other world.

David Berlinski
Like two lost and lonely railroad tracks, the coordinate axes stretch to the north and to the south and to the past and to the future.

David Berlinski
To geology go the Rock and Riffs; entomology gets the bugs.

David Berlinski
The question belongs to the great good-hearted congregation of questions asked by the hopelessly lost.

David Berlinski
It required an act of profound intellectual audacity to assign a name and hence a symbol to all that nothingness. Nothing, nada, Zip, Zero, 0.

David Berlinski
For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race.

David Berlinski
Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles, military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

David Berlinski
For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is a mistake-there is no other word. Where else can the restless human mind find means to tie the infinite in a finite bow?

David Berlinski
Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

David Berlinski
Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

David Berlinski
Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.

David Berlinski
Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

David Berlinski
Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

David Berlinski
Bystanders wandered in and out of the merchant's stall, passing the time, talking of dreams they might purchase. Workers and slaves stooped from labor asked timidly for dreams of wine and ease. Women asked for dreams of love, and men for dreams of women.

David Berlinski
I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

David Berlinski
Like the human soul, an irrational number is only partly known, and however more is known of either there is always infinitely more to know.

David Berlinski
Leibniz endeavored to provide an account of inference and judgment involving the mechanical play of symbols and very little else. The checklists that result are the first of humanity's intellectual artifacts. They express, they explain, and so they ratify a power of the mind. And, of course, they are artifacts in the process of becoming algorithms.

David Berlinski
The overall structure of the calculus is simple. The subject is defined by a fantastic leading idea, one basic axiom, a calm and profound intellectual invention, a deep property, two crucial definitions, one ancillary definition, one major theorem, and the fundamental theorem of the calculus.

David Berlinski