John Allen Paulos Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of numbers and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens.

John Allen Paulos
Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the innumerate into a dumb acquiescence.

John Allen Paulos
We are trying to measure bacteria with a yardstick.

John Allen Paulos
When asked why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he's a Gemini and Geminis never believe in astrology.

John Allen Paulos
Zealots, true believers, fanatics, and fundamentalists of Aall types seldom hold any truck with anything as wishy-washy as probability. May they all burn in hell for 1010 years (just kidding), or be forced to take a course in probability theory.

John Allen Paulos
Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he's lived in the state his whole life, replies, "Not yet."

John Allen Paulos
I used to be surprised and even depressed when I met someone I had admired and discovered him or her to be a jerk or, perhaps worse, rather common. Now I half expect this reaction and even find it a little reassuring, maybe even uplifting. Isn't it amazing that somebody like that could produce such and such.

John Allen Paulos
In general, almost any mathematically expressed scientific fact can be transformed into a consumer caveat (or lure) that will terrify (or attract) people.

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

John Allen Paulos
One must give up the fantasy of a perspicacious gunslinger/investor
outwitting the market.

John Allen Paulos
The only bit of logic-based public bathroom humor I know is: the difference between men and women is that between the statement [P and not Q] and the statement [Q and not P].

John Allen Paulos
Mathematics is no more computation than writing is typing.

John Allen Paulos
How many pizzas are consumed each year in the United States? How many words have you spoken in your life? How many different peoples names appear in the New York Times each year? How many watermelons would fit inside the U.S. Capital building? What is the volume of all the human blood in the world?

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

John Allen Paulos
There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey.

John Allen Paulos
Adding, though pleasant and easy, is often inappropriate.... Recall that mathematics as simple as '1 + 1 = 2' can be thoughtlessly misapplied: If 1 cup of popcorn is added to 1 cup of water, we do not end up with 2 cups of soggy popcorn.

John Allen Paulos
It's been estimated that, because of the exponential growth of the world's population, between 10 and 20 percent of all the human beings who have ever lived are alive now. If this is so, does this mean that there isn't enough statistical evidence to conclusively reject the hypothesis of immortality?

John Allen Paulos