Pickover Quotes

#1. Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

Mark Frauenfelder

#2. Pickover's lively, provocative travel guide takes readers into the fascinating realm of mystic math, from perfectly strange numbers to fractured geometries and other curious nooks and crannies of ancient worlds and modern times.

Ivars Peterson

#3. I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

Clifford A. Pickover

#4. [ ... ] the biggest failures typically come before the biggest breakthroughs. That no matter what, I should never get discouraged. Learn from my mistakes and all will be well.

Joelle Charbonneau

#5. I'm calling myself 'The Doodler,' and with the simple addition of a small burglar's mask, I achieve utter anonymity.

Chris Riddell

#6. There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.

Clifford A. Pickover

#7. Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.

Clifford A. Pickover

#8. Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.

Clifford A. Pickover

#9. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.

Clifford A. Pickover

#10. For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.

Clifford A. Pickover

#11. So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

Denise Levertov

#12. As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls

Clifford A. Pickover

#13. At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Clifford A. Pickover

#14. Neutronium is so dense that a chunk the size of a thimble would weigh about 100 million tons.

Clifford A. Pickover

#15. To use good things to our own ends is always a false religion

Richard J. Foster

#16. This three-dimensional froth even produces tunnels and wormlike tubes commonly depicted in embedding diagrams for quantum froth. The connecting bridges in the foam correspond to wormholes between different universes or between different places in the same universe.

Clifford A. Pickover

#17. In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.

Theodor Adorno

#18. I am only yours, my Luna. I was yours from my first breath and I will be yours until my last.

Quinn Loftis

#19. Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.

Clifford A. Pickover

#20. The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

Clifford A. Pickover

#21. Einstein created an unstoppable "intellectual chain reaction," an avalanche of pulsing, chattering neurons and memes that will ring for an eternity

Clifford A. Pickover

#22. Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.

Clifford A. Pickover

#23. Now Mitt is not a perfect candidate. He has a number of problems. It's hard for him, for blue collar families like mine to identify with him. It's hard for economic conservatives to identify with him. He needs to do more to reach out to Latinos ...

George Pataki