Profilo utente

"What would you say to Jesus if you saw him on the street?" Erdos said he'd ask Jesus if the Continuum Hypothesis was true. "And there would be three possible answers for Jesus," Erdos said. "He could say, 'Godel and Cohen already taught you everything which is to be known about it.' The second answer would be, 'Yes, there is an answer but unfortunately your brain isn't sufficiently developed yet to know the answer.' And Jesus could give a third answer: 'The Father, the Holy Ghost, and I have been thinking about that long before creation, but we haven't yet come to a conclusion.' Perhaps this is the nicest answer.”

— The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth di Paul Hoffman (Pagina 226)

"It is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as the sum of two fourth powers or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers." To this far-reaching statement-Fermat's Last Theorem-he appended the comment: "I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain."

— The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth di Paul Hoffman (Pagina 188)

Godel demonstrated that no complex mathematical system was complete. In other words, no matter what axioms are chosen, meaningful mathematical statements can be made whose truth or falseness can never be demonstrated within the system.

Godel's second discovery was even more devastating. He demonstrated that it was impossible to prove that any given complex mathematical system was consistent. In other words, you can never be sure that the set of axioms won't lead to a contradiction. On the Richter scale of mathematical discoveries, Godel's was a 10.

As Andre Weil, number theorist extraordinaire, put it: "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."

— The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth di Paul Hoffman (Pagina 117)

"A mathematician," Erdos was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: "There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave."

— The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth di Paul Hoffman (Pagina 7)

"An epsilon!" Erdos said. (Epsilon was Erdos's word for a small child; in mathematics that Greek letter is used to represent small quantities.)

— The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth di Paul Hoffman (Pagina 4)

Dimmi chi sei, Tu che hai un aspetto così terribile. Mi inchino davanti a Te, o Dio Supremo; abbi pietà. Desidero conoscere Te, l’Essere Primigenio. In verità, non comprendo il Tuo operare. Il Signore Beato disse: Io sono il Tempo, potente distruttore di mondi, impegnato ora a distruggere i mondi. Tranne te, non sopravvivrà nessuno dei guerrieri schierati in assetto di combattimento. Perciò alzato in piedi e conquista la gloria. Sconfiggi i nemici e godi le gioie di un regno senza rivali. Io li ho già uccisi; tu devi essere soltanto lo strumento, o mancino.

— Bhagavad-Gita di Vyasa (Pagina 200)