Gary Bennett

“A science involving things you can’t see whose presence is confined to the imagination.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“The belief that mathematics exists somewhere else than within us, that it is discovered more than created, is called Platonism, after Plato’s belief in a non-spatiotemporal realm that was the region of the perfect forms of which the objects on earth were imperfect reproductions. By definition, the non-spatiotemporal realm is outside time and space. It is not the creation of any deity, it simply is. To say that it is eternal or that it has always existed is to make a temporal remark, which does not apply. It is the timeless nowhere which never has and never will exist anywhere but which nevertheless is. The physical world is temporal and declines, the non-spatiotemporal one is ideal and doesn’t.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“For most of the people in [my] class,4 art was the truth about life—and life itself, as they saw it, was more or less a lie,” he wrote. “If civilization could be thought of as having a sexuality, art was its sexuality”
― Philip Gefter, Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“Mathematics is objective and permanent. A² + B² = C² was true before Pythagoras had his name attached to it, and will be true when the sun goes out and no one is left to think of it. It is true for any alien life that might think of it, and true whether they think of it or not. It cannot be changed.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age