Ciphers Quote by Alexander Grothendieck

“But of any science of cryptanalysis, there was nothing. Only cryptography existed. And therefore cryptology, which involves both cryptography and cryptanalysis, had not yet…

— David Kahn

The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

— Freeman Dyson

Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so surprising. The rules which we make up at the beginning seem ordinary…

— Edward Charles Titchmarsh

Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure…

— Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words;…

— Mal Peet

They [the mathematicians of the Enlightenment] defined their terms vaguely and used their methods loosely, and the logic of their arguments was made to…

— Tobias Dantzig

I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could…

— Terence Tao

What would mathematics have amounted to without the imagination of its devotees-its giants and their followers? There never was a discovery made without the…

— David Eugene Smith

Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their…

— Benoit Mandelbrot

The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth…

— Keith Devlin