Quotes from Marcus du Sautoy

I also fell in love with Borges. He is a mathematician's writer. His short stories are like mathematical proofs, delicately constructed and with ideas laced together effortlessly. Each step is taken with precision and watertight logic, yet the narrative is full of surprising twists and turns.

The first algorithm to win its creators a Nobel Prize—originally formulated by two mathematicians, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, in 1962

The knowledge of what we are ignorant of seems to expand faster than our catalogue of breakthroughs.

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.

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.

The scientist does not study Nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If Nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if Nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.' One

In the early 1990s a PhD student by the name of Zhihong Xia proved that there is a way to configure five planets such that when you let them go, the combined gravitational pull causes one of the planets to fly off and reach an infinite speed in a finite amount of time.

How do politicians cope with the challenges of predicting or manipulating the future, given that we can have only partial knowledge of the systems being analysed? 'I think that's rather a flattering account of what goes on here. With some notable exceptions it's mostly a bunch of very egotistical people, very ambitious people, who are primarily interested in their own careers.

You don't have any need for a creator. Quantum fluctuations mean that we are seeing something appearing from nothing all the time.

Of course, physics prevents us from dividing things beyond a certain limit, determined by what is called the Planck constant. This is because, according to physicists, it is actually impossible to measure a distance smaller than 10-34m without creating a black hole that would swallow up the measuring device.

Doufejme, že p?jdu do d?chodu d?ív, než n?kdo n?co takového objeví, takže už to nebude moje starost.

It is Boden's third form of creativity that is the more mysterious and elusive, and that is transformational creativity. This describes those rare moments that are complete game changers. Every art form has these gear shifts. Think of Picasso and Cubism, Schoenberg and atonality, Joyce and modernism. They are like phase changes, when water suddenly goes from a liquid to a gas.

Humankind now produces in two days the same amount of data it took us from the dawn of civilisation until 2003 to generate.

Much modern art is no longer about the appreciation of an aesthetic and skill by the likes of Rembrandt or Leonardo, but rather the interesting message and perspective that the artist is revealing about our relationship to our world.

Art does many things, but for me where art is at its best is in providing a window into the way another mind works.

A prímek listája a szívverés a matematikában, de mintha egy er?s koffeinkeverék szabálytalanná tenné ezt a lüktetést.

Why do we as humans create art? Why is Richter's work regarded as art while a book of Dulux colour samples is not?

It doesn't matter how the paint is put on,' he wrote in describing his method, 'as long as something is said. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

this equation into the future, it takes a dramatic lurch downward, absurdly predicting complete annihilation of the US population in the middle of October 2028. (Or perhaps the mathematics knows something we don't!) Graph source: The Mathworks, Inc.