The high number from the Middle East is only coincidence, he said. It is no particular choice on our part, ... We accept visa trainees from those countries. We'd accept them from other countries, too, but we don't get their applications.

If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

If present trends continue, our country may soon find itself far behind many other nations in both science and technology nations where, if you inform strangers that you are a mathematician, they respond with admiration and not by telling you how much they hated math in school, and how they sure could use you to balance their checkbooks.

All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.