How Not to Be Wrong Quotes

“There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Cauchy was not interested in the needs of engineers. Cauchy was interested in the truth.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, “Let’s face it, I’m smarter than Gauss.” And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Public opinion doesn’t exist. More precisely, it exists sometimes, concerning matters about which there’s a clear majority view.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“If you’ve ever run an experiment, you know scientific truth doesn’t pop out of the clouds blowing a flaming trumpet at you. Data is messy, and inference is hard.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It's not wrong to say Hilbert was a genius. But it's more right to say that what Hilbert accomplished was genius. Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Suppose you have a group of fifty experimental subjects, who you hypothesize (H) are human beings. You observe (O) that one of them is an albino. Now, albinism is extremely rare, affecting no more than one in twenty thousand people. So given that H is correct, the chance you’d find an albino among your fifty subjects is quite small, less than 1 in 400,* or 0.0025. So the p-value, the probability of observing O given H, is much lower than .05. We are inexorably led to conclude, with a high degree of statistical confidence, that H is incorrect: the subjects in the sample are not human beings.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“You can explain it to a Congressman in six minutes and he can talk about it for six months.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don’t worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else’s. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Yes, the existence of human life is evidence for the existence of God; but it’s much better evidence that our world was programmed by people much smarter than us.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself.*”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Mark Twain is good on this: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying "huh," but rather making a firm assertion: "I'm not sure, this is why I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am." Or even more: "I'm unsure, and you should be too.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“In 1931, Kurt Godel proved in his famous second incompleteness theorem that there could be no finitary proof of the consistency of arithmetic. He had killed Hilbert's program with a single stroke.

So should you be worried that all of mathematics might collapse tomorrow afternoon? For what it's worth, I'm not. I do believe in infinite sets, and I find the proofs of consistency that use infinite sets to be convincing enough to let me sleep at night.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“That's how the Law of Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what's already happened, but by diluting what's already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionally negligible that it can safely be forgotten.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“He was unsweaty, undusty, and unbloody, but he was right. He was a critic who counted.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The thesis of the book,” he writes in response, “when correctly interpreted, is essentially trivial. . . . To ‘prove’ such a mathematical result by a costly and prolonged numerical study of many kinds of business profit and expense ratios is analogous to proving the multiplication table by arranging elephants in rows and columns, and then doing the same for numerous other kinds of animals. The performance, though perhaps entertaining, and having a certain pedagogical value, is not an important contribution either to zoölogy or mathematics.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“To do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“It’s not always wrong to be wrong.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“0.33333. . . . .= 1/3. Multiply both sides by 3 and you’ll see 0.99999. . . .= 3/3= 1.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Dividing one number by another is mere computation; figuring out what you should divide by what is mathematics.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Don’t talk about percentages of numbers when the numbers might be negative.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“You can't write a sonnet if you have to look up the spelling of each word as you go.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“torturing the data until it confesses,”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Mathematics is common sense.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking