Sublime

is also considered a “golden” irrational number, called φ, equal to 0.61803 39887, etc. (note that the zero is followed by the same decimal series calculated in Φ).

The promise, like the wheel, is unknown in Nature: and is the first mark of man.

in general, an introductory textbook on probability is Richard Isaac’s The Pleasures of Probability.9

The lesson is very much in line with Thurston’s remark that “The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.”

The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and ‘serious’ expresses what I mean much better. I am not thinking of the ‘practical’ consequences of mathematics. I have to return to that point later: at present I will say only that if a chess problem is, in the crude sense, ‘useless’, t

I said that a mathematician was a maker of patterns of ideas, and that beauty and seriousness were the criteria by which his patterns should be judged.

Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is Mr. Bernard Shaw.