God as a mathematician (quotes)

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The laws of the universe are mathematical

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The laws of nature are mathematical…

Nature is written in mathematical language. Galileo Galilei
Nature’s great book is written in mathematics. Galileo Galilei
Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. Max Tegmark
Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe. John Polkinghorne
Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is. Ian Stewart
There are mathematical equations, little squiggles on pieces of paper, that tell us how whole universes behave. John Barrow
Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry. Vladimir Arnold
Patterns and regularities exist in nature that mathematics can accurately predict. It’s a wonder. It doesn’t need to be that way. Anthony Lambert
Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena. Albert Einstein
We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mathematics directs the flow of the universe, lurks behind its shapes and curves, holds the reins of everything from tiny atoms to the biggest stars. Edward Frenkel
One cannot understand… the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it. Richard P. Feynman
The essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures. James Jeans
One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures. Galileo Galilei
When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function. Nature is an embodied mathematical system. Galileo
Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude. Friedrich Nietzsche
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. … [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature. Albert Einstein
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true. Georg C. Lichtenberg
The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe. Karl Pearson
The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics…the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word. Galileo Galilei
Among all of the mathematical disciplines the theory of differential equations is the most important… It furnishes the explanation of all those elementary manifestations of nature which involve time. Sophus Lie
The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people. And combining the two is creating this beautiful alliance between humanity and nature. That’s why my forests are mathematical expansion systems, all of them. Agnes Denes
The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics. Galileo Galilei
… it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case. Richard P. Feynman
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. James Clerk Maxwell
For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems. Michael Frayn
…nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics, as our own mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world. James Jeans
Heading off in another direction, a new book by the physicist Max Tegmark suggests that a different ingredient — mathematics — needs to be admitted into science as one of nature’s irreducible parts. In fact, he believes, it may be the most fundamental of all. George Johnson
It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations. Pierre-Simon Laplace
We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it. Roger Penrose
Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply ‘given,’ elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science. Paul Davies
All phenomena are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to have a sufficient number of observations and a mathematics that is complex enough. Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
Until now, physical theories have been regarded as merely models which approximately describe the reality of nature. As the models improve, so the fit between theory and reality gets closer. Some physicists are now claiming that supergravity is the reality, that the model and the real world are in mathematically perfect accord. Paul Davies
For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others. Francis Bacon
Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework. Melvin Schwartz
A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics. Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that this is just what we would expect if the laws of physics were based on a computational algorithm. Philip Ball
Three principles – the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the utility of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality – are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics. Murray Gell-Mann

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…even down to the quantum level

Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato’s sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. Rupert Sheldrake
The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works. And it tells us our reality is continually branching into different possibilities, just like a coral. Antony Garrett Lisi
Quantum physics is a bit of a passion of mine. It’s extraordinary. There’s a branch of mathematics that is based on lunacy, and that’s wonderful. Bob Hoskins
For me, the important thing about quantum mechanics is the equations, the mathematics. If you want to understand quantum mechanics, just do the math. All the words that are spun around it don’t mean very much. It’s like playing the violin. If violinists were judged on how they spoke, it wouldn’t make much sense. Freeman Dyson

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Why the laws of nature are mathematical is a profound mystery because it does not need to be that way

Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most. Terence McKenna
Why does the natural world always – so far as we know – obey laws of mathematics? Eugene Wigner
The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it. Eugene Wigner
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Albert Einstein
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. Eugene Wigner
It remains a mystery to scientists why mathematics has the ability to so accurately describe the structure and behaviors of reality, but it is impossible to be a physicist and not have come to appreciate that it does. Joseph Selbie
The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it. Carl Sagan
The important point is not merely that there are regularities in nature, but that these regularities are mathematically precise, universal, and “tied together.” Einstein spoke of them as “reason incarnate.” The question we should ask is how nature came packaged in this fashion. Antony Flew
Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. Israel Gelfand
You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too. And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That’s just an amazing piece of luck, which we don’t understand. Freeman Dyson
As physicists investigate the most fundamental characteristics of nature, they’re tackling issues that have long been the province of philosophers and theologians: Is the universe infinite and eternal? Why does it seem to follow mathematical laws, and are those laws inevitable? And, perhaps most important, why does the universe exist? Why is there something instead of nothing? Mark Alpert
Even if we should ever succeed at tracing back the entire physical narrative of reality to its origin from “matter” (using that word in the broadest sense, as an alternative to all things “spiritual”) and to a set of immutable physical laws (like the law of gravity) describable by mathematics, we shall still not have dispensed with form or finality. What, after all, are laws, and why can mathematics describe them at all? David Bentley Hart
I sometimes think we fail to be nearly as surprised and baffled by mathematical knowledge as we ought to be largely because we tend to think of the world as vaguely “arithmetical,” in the sense that its parts are enumerable and measurable, and because we lazily think of pure mathematics as just some sort of immense amplification of arithmetic, rather than the angelic language of nearly limitless intelligibility that it is. David Bentley Hart
THEY call it the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase in the 1960s to encapsulate the curious fact that merely by manipulating numbers we can describe and predict all manner of natural phenomena with astonishing clarity, from the movements of planets and the strange behaviour of fundamental particles to the consequences of a collision between two black holes billions of light years away. Michael Brooks
Our experience teaches us that there are indeed laws of nature, regularities in the way things behave, and that these laws are best expressed using the language of mathematics. This raises the interesting possibility that mathematical consistency might be used to guide us, along with experimental observation, to the laws that describe physical reality, and this has proved to be the case time and again throughout the history of science. We will see this happen during the course of this book, and it is truly one of the wonderful mysteries of our universe that it should be so. Brian Cox

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It is even more mysterious that we can comprehend the mathematical nature of the universe

Perhaps even more mysterious and wondrous than the mathematical nature of the universe is the fact that we possess the consciousness and intelligence to comprehend this. Anthony Lambert
It takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible. Michael Peligro
Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes. Eric Temple Bell
Nagel finds it astonishing that the human brain — this biological organ that evolved on the third rock from the sun — has developed a science and a mathematics so in tune with the cosmos that it can predict and explain so many things. George Johnson
Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I think the most amazing thing is how gifted we are – we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently. We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. Freeman Dyson
Is it true that simple laws, in these senses, are more probable than complicated ones? I cannot see any reason at all for saying so. We may very much like to have laws that are elegant, comprehensive, parsimonious and mathematically precise. That will suit our aesthetic tastes. If the laws are like that, it will be a great and unexpected gift, as Eugene Wigner famously said. But it is not by any means probable that the laws should be like that. If anything, it is amazingly improbable that the laws of nature should be so finely adjusted to our intellectual capacities. Keith Ward

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Is the mathematical nature of the universe proof of God?

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Some argue the mathematical nature of the universe is proof of God

God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it. Andre Weil
We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. Alexander Polyakov
God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology. Hilda Phoebe Hudson
For since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear. Leonhard Euler
The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics. Johannes Kepler
There may be innumerable finite causes of complexity, but a good argument can be made that only a single infinite cause can account for perfect, universal, intelligible, mathematically describable order. David Bentley Hart
Sir Arthur Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics. Sir James Jeans deduces it from the fact that they do. Bertrand Russell
Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria. Johannes Kepler
Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. Vladimir Nabokov
There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge. Francis Collins
Mathematics is one of the surest ways for a man to feel the power of thought and the magic of the spirit. Mathematics is one of the eternal truths and, as such, raises the spirit to the same level on which we feel the presence of God. Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza
When Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God’s most devine and sacred gift. William J. Clinton
Now you may think I have written God entirely out of the picture. Who needs a God when the laws of physics can do such a splendid job? But we are bound to return to that burning question: Where do the laws of physics come from? And why those laws rather than some other set? Most especially: Why a set of laws that drives the searing, featureless gases coughed out of the big bang toward life and consciousness and intelligence and cultural activities such as religion, art, mathematics, and science? Paul Davies

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They point out that the mathematical laws underpinning the universe are extremely precise…

Precise mathematical laws govern the four fundamental forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
If math exists beyond all created things, it stabilizes the constants and anchors reality in a place untouched by nature’s chaos, roughness, and irregularity. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos

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…and seem to have been precisely fine-tuned to allow life to exist

The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Edward Robert Harrison
The laws of physics accepted by modern science, including the particular values of its fundamental constants, are minutely fine-tuned to permit the evolution of life to go on. Bernard Haisch
It’s hard to get past the proposition that the constants of nature have their particular values because the universe is built to allow for life to develop. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
The Goldilocks Enigma is the idea that everything in the universe is just right for life, like the porridge in the fairy tale. Paul Davies
A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world. John Archibald Wheeler
This is a fine-tuned universe, which has a number of constants in play. If any of these constants had a different value, then life as we know it would not have been possible. Therefore, there must have been an intelligent designer. Alan H. Dawe

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The universe, they argue, thus shows every sign of mathematical and intelligent design

I hope the foregoing discussion will have convinced the reader that the natural world is not just any old concoction of entities and forces, but a marvelously ingenious and unified mathematical scheme. …these rules look as if they are the product of intelligent design. I do not see how that can be denied. Paul Davies
The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is “something behind it all” is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists. Paul Davies
If the simulation hypothesis is correct, then “there’s a creator, an architect — someone who designed the world.” It’s an ancient idea recast in terms of “mathematics and science rather than just faith. Rich Terrile

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God, they argue, is a consummate mathematician…

God ever arithmetizes. Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
If there is a God, he’s a great mathematician. Paul Dirac
God is an awesome mathematician and physicist. Francis Collins
The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. Euclid
Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero. Steven Wright
God has the Big Book, the beautiful proofs of mathematical theorems are listed here. Paul Erdos
God made integers; all else is the work of man. Leopold Kronecker
The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics. Galileo Galilei
The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man’s doing. Leopold Kronecker
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically. Albert Einstein
A mathematical formula should never be “owned” by anybody! Mathematics belong to God. Donald Knuth
Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God. Herbert Turnbull
God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Paul A. M. Dirac
Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied. John Edensor Littlewood
One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Paul Dirac
The mathematical phenomenon always develops out of simple arithmetic, so useful in everyday life, out of numbers, those weapons of the gods: the gods are there, behind the wall, at play with numbers. Le Corbusier
Paul Erdos has a theory that God has a book containing all the theorems of mathematics with their absolutely most beautiful proofs, and when he wants to express particular appreciation of a proof he exclaims, “This is from the book!” Ross Honsberger
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Plato
God is a pure mathematician!’ declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991…. It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α). Paul Davies

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…who used beautiful mathematics in creating the universe

God built the universe on numbers. Pythagoras
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world. Paul Dirac
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei
In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy. Nicholas of Cusa
All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers. James Clerk Maxwell
People who wish to analyze nature without using mathematics must settle for a reduced understanding. Richard P. Feynman
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws. Pierre-Simon Laplace
The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways; but he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers. Scott Adams
The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics. Isaac Newton
We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists’ attempts to describe nature. Alexander Markovich Polyakov
If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures? Martin Gardner
In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton’s laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction. Albert Einstein
Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist. Saint Augustine
…all of creation was made so that we, men and women, could see and testify to God’s glory in it. It says that all of this, the entire universe, was created for us, for us to see and to observe and to appreciate, for alone in all creation, man his this capacity to see and observe and appreciate. This means that all of the laws of physics, of chemistry, of motion, of mathematics, of thermodynamics, all natural laws, were authored by a God who delights in man’s discovery of them when that discovery is accompanied by an appreciation of the God who created them. Robert W. Faid

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God is an expert in applied geometry

Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind. Thomas Hobbes
Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed. They are no exceptions to the rule that God always geometrizes. Their problems of form are in the first instance mathematical problems, their problems of growth are essentially physical problems, and the morphologist is, ipso facto, a student of physical science. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria. Johannes Kepler
One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit “God eternally geometrizes.” David Eugene Smith
Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God. Johannes Kepler
Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God’s own likeness – and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes. Johannes Kepler

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Through mathematical laws, God brings order to the world…

Order is heaven’s first law. Alexander Pope
I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible. May Sarton
Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty. Deepak Chopra
The language of mathematics exhibits every quality of design: balance, harmony, symmetry, and some would say beauty. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension. Isaac Newton
The universe contains vastly more order than Earth-life could ever demand. All those distant galaxies, irrelevant for our existence, seem as equally well ordered as our own. Paul Davies
All nature has come to expect from God a sense of orderliness. Whatever God does carries with it His fingerprint. And in the world around us His fingerprint of orderliness is evident to anybody who is honest with the facts. If you look at nature, you will discover a mathematical exactness. Without this precision, the entire world would be in utter confusion. One plus one always equals two no matter what part of the universe you happen to be in. And the laws of nature operate in beautiful harmony, a harmony that is ordered by God Himself. Aiden Wilson Tozer

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…order and harmony that reveals and expresses God

God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. Albert Einstein
One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself. Lee Smolin
I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand. I believe that the energy of the universe is ordered by forces I cannot comprehend. Robert Jensen

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It is God that breathes life into the mathematical equations of the universe

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Stephen Hawkins
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. Freeman Dyson
One cannot escape the feeling that these equations have an existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them. Heinrich Herz
These are the qualities that have inspired some of the greatest artists to create their masterpieces, and they are precisely the same qualities that motivate scientists to search for the laws of nature. Like a work of art or a haunting poem, equations have a beauty and rhythm all their own. Michio Kaku
Take away God and what also disappears is a very good reason for the existence of a universe containing intelligent, finite minds. We are left with the question that Stephen Hawking asked in A Brief History of Time: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ Keith Ward
In the 1860s, a Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell succeeded in summarizing all that was known about phenomena such as electricity and magnetism in four short equations possessed of as much aesthetic elegance as theoretical impact. But Maxwell did not merely succeed in summarizing in his equations everything people already knew. He also succeeded in predicting phenomena that nobody thought had anything to do with electricity and magnetism— phenomena that were not discovered until after Maxwell’s death in 1879. How could this be possible? Asked Ludwig Boltzmann, a contemporary of Maxwell’s and a colleague in the formulation of important theoretical landmarks. How can a summary of a rich and varied collection of phenomena occur with so few and such powerful symbols as those we find in the four famous lines that constitute Maxwell’s equations? In a sense, this is the very mystery of science: Not only can it pursue the goal of saying as much as possible in as few words or equations as possible, drawing a map of the terrain, a map that simply and clearly summarizes all the important data and thus allows us to find our way; but— and here lies the mystery—it can create a map that enables us to see details of the terrain that were unknown when the map was drawn! Tor Norrethranders

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Mathematics is God’s relation to the realm of nature…

If memory within nature sounds mysterious, we should bear in mind that mathematical laws transcending nature are more rather than less so; they are metaphysical rather than physical. The way mathematical laws can exist independently of the evolving universe and at the same time act upon it remains a profound mystery. For those who accept God, this mystery is an aspect of God’s relation to the realm of nature; for those who deny God, the mystery is even more obscure: A quasi-mental realm of mathematical laws somehow exists independently of nature, yet not in God, and governs the evolving physical world without itself being physical. Rupert Sheldrake

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…and gives us insight into the mind of God

What’s the best part of being a mathematician? I’m not a religious man, but it’s almost like being in touch with God when you’re thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it’s fun to try to learn some of the secrets. Paul Halmos
In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven. Edward Everett Hale

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Mathematics is the very language of God

Mathematics is the language in which the gods talk to people. Plato
The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That’s just an amazing piece of luck, which we don’t understand. Freeman Dyson
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei
When Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God’s most devine and sacred gift. William J. Clinton
The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics. Galileo

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Mathematics is described by some as a branch of theology…

This is not mathematics; this is theology. Paul Gordan
God is truth, anything that is true is a fact about God, and mathematics is a branch of theology. Hilda Phoebe Hudson

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…and even a religion…

The Mathematics are Friends to Religion; inasmuch as they charm the Passions, restrain the Impetuosity of Imagination, and purge the Mind from Error and Prejudice. John Arbuthnot
One would normally define a “religion” as a system of ideas that contain statements that cannot be logically or observationally demonstrated… Gödel’s theorem not only demonstrates that mathematics is a religion, but shows that mathematics is the only religion that proves itself to be one! John D. Barrow

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…which is ironical because mathematics is also described by others as the religion of atheists

Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics. Bill Gaede
Regardless of whether or not God exists, God has no place in mathematics, at least in my book. Doron Zeilberger

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Mathematics belongs to God…

Mathematics is the Life of the Gods. Novalis
A mathematical formula should never be “owned” by anybody! Mathematics belong to God. Donald Knuth

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…and is a divine pursuit…

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit. Alfred North Whitehead
He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god. Plato
There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them. Plato
Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind… it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location… it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting. Leonardo da Vinci
Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers: local truth and truth of location. Vladimir Nabokov

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…that can bring us closer to God…

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God’s personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern. Isaac Asimov

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…and makes us Godlike

He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god. Plato

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In ancient times, mathematics was very much associated with God

In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm. Margaret Wertheim

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Mathematics, like God, is an ineffable a mystery

What Is Mathematics? This question, if asked in earnest, has no answer. Salomon Bochner
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. Bertrand Russell
The fact that mathematics does such a good job of describing the Universe is a mystery that we don’t understand. And a debt that we will probably never be able to repay. Lord Kelvin
Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate. Leonhard Euler
There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that’s fine. I mean, that’s just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe. Richard Dawkins
I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don’t get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn’t enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics? Tom Lehrer
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics “is”… and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change “mathematics” to “God” and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics. John D. Barrow

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It is through mathematics that we can come to an understanding of infinity…

Black holes result from God dividing the universe by zero. Steven Wright
The infinite in mathematics is always unruly unless it is properly treated. Edward Kasner
Mathematics is, in many ways, the most precious response that the human spirit has made to the call of the infinite. Cassius Jackson Keyser
God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets. Gian-Carlo Rota
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Blaise Pascal
Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory. Hermann Weyl
There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity. All life is one; therefore, there cannot be God and man, nor a universe and God. A god not in the world is a false god, and a world not in God is unreal. All things return to one, and one operates in all. Nyogen Senzaki
The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul’s quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment. Rudy Rucker
Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin andyang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in scienceand religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero andinfinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy,of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay a zero‚ and an infinity. Charles Seife
Georg Cantor was the first to prove that there could be a series of infinities; that infinities come in an infinite number of sizes.] Thus Cantor’s Absolute is a perfect image for what we experience of God. When I speak of a Big Enough God I am not merely thinking of an Infinite God, but the God of infinities, the Absolute, which either chooses to reveal itself or remains veiled in mystery. Modern mathematics does begin to feel like the language that God talks. Sara Maitland

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…and zero

I don’t agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure. Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and yang. They are equally paradoxical and troubling. The biggest questions in science and religion are about nothingness and eternity, the void and the infinite, zero and infinity. The clashes over zero were the battles that shook the foundations of philosophy, of science, of mathematics, and of religion. Underneath every revolution lay zero – and an infinity. Charles Seife
To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be. Leonhard Euler

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God, the mathematician, some would argue, is an impersonal God

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return. Bertrand Russell