Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.