Simon Singh > Quotes

“Romantics might like to think of themselves as being composed of stardust. Cynics might prefer to think of themselves as nuclear waste.”
― Simon Singh

“All that was required to measure the planet was a man with a stick and a brain. In other words, couple an intellect with some experimental apparatus and almost anything seems achievable.”
― Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe

“God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. “How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!” To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!” The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“Maths is one of the purest forms of thought, and to outsiders mathematicians may seem almost other-worldly.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that ‘the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it’. He then argued that the possible prize of eternal happiness has an infinite value and that the probability of entering heaven by leading a virtuous life, no matter how small, is certainly finite. Therefore, according to Pascal’s definition, religion was a game of infinite excitement and one worth playing, because multiplying an infinite prize by a finite probability results in infinity.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“Similarly, if you’re trying to prove something mathematically, it’s possible that no proof exists.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Scientific proof is inevitably fickle and shoddy. On the other hand mathematical proof is absolute and devoid of doubt.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Last Theorem

“Proof is what lies at the heart of maths, and is what marks it out from other sciences. Other sciences have hypotheses that are tested against experimental evidence until they fail, and are overtaken by new hypotheses. In maths, absolute proof is the goal, and once something is proved, it is proved forever, with no room for change.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“if N is large enough, it is virtually impossible to deduce p and q from N, and this is perhaps the most beautiful and elegant aspect of the RSA asymmetric cipher.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“if a message protected by quantum cryptography were ever to be deciphered, it would mean that quantum theory is flawed,”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kronecker said, “God made the integers; all the rest is the work of man.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue in my life what had been my childhood dream. I know it's a rare privilege, but if you can tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything imaginable." - Andrew Wiles”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“the enemy of security: repetition leads to patterns, and cryptanalysts thrive on patterns.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The first known European book to describe the use of cryptography was written in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan monk and polymath Roger Bacon. Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic included seven methods for keeping messages secret, and cautioned: “A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The Last Theorem is at the heart of an intriguing saga of courage, skulduggery, cunning, and tragedy, involving all the greatest heroes of mathematics.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“... the way to an intellectual's heart is via her library...”
― Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

“Enigma was considered invulnerable, until the Poles revealed its weaknesses.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean. G.H. Hardy 23”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“This apparently innocuous observation would lead to the first great breakthrough in cryptanalysis.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

“The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. G.H. Hardy”
― Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

“(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses.”
― Simon Singh, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine

“The NSA employs more mathematicians, buys more computer hardware, and intercepts more messages than any other organization in the world.”
― Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography