I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.

If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.