Quotes About Combinatorics

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.

We have not begun to understand the relationship between combinatorics and conceptual mathematics.

Map coloring problem. Find the smallest number m such that the faces of every planar graph can be colored with m or fewer colors in such a way that faces sharing a border have different colors.

Counting pairs is the oldest trick in combinatorics... Every time we count pairs, we learn something from it.

If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.

Combinatorics allow a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an Infinite set of complex ones.

By throwing enough words together, some unusual and magical-sounding metaphor is bound to emerge according to the laws of combinatorics.