John Allen Paulos

Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security

— John Allen Paulos

I used to be surprised and even depressed when I met someone I had admired and discovered him or her to be…

— John Allen Paulos

The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the…

— John Allen Paulos

In the stock market... You can be right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons.

— John Allen Paulos

“The nuclear weapons on board just one of our Trident submarines contain eight times the firepower expended in all of World War…

— John Allen Paulos

When asked why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he's a Gemini and Geminis never believe in…

— John Allen Paulos

Defined broadly enough, mathematics encompasses everything.

— John Allen Paulos

So many see themselves as aggrieved; so few see themselves as aggrievers.

— John Allen Paulos

“I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as “historical factorials.” Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not…

— John Allen Paulos

Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he's lived in the state his whole life, replies, "Not…

— John Allen Paulos

Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.

— John Allen Paulos

There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual…

— John Allen Paulos

Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!

— John Allen Paulos

One must give up the fantasy of a perspicacious gunslinger/investor outwitting the market.

— John Allen Paulos

How many pizzas are consumed each year in the United States? How many words have you spoken in your life? How many…

— John Allen Paulos

A German merchant of the fifteenth century asked an eminent professor where he should send his son for a good business education.…

— John Allen Paulos

Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think.

— John Allen Paulos

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an…

— John Allen Paulos

Innumeracy and pseudoscience are often associated, in part because of the ease with which mathematical certainty can be invoked, to bludgeon the…

— John Allen Paulos

The once-surprising existence of non-Euclidean models of Euclid's first four axioms can be seen as a sort of mathematical joke.

— John Allen Paulos

Uncertainty would be the only certainty there's, and realizing how to stay with insecurity could be the only protection

— John Allen Paulos

The only bit of logic-based public bathroom humor I know is: the difference between men and women is that between the statement…

— John Allen Paulos

The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are on the floor.

— John Allen Paulos

We ourselves are co-called non-linear dynamical systems... I don't feel quite so pathetic when I interrupt a project to check on some…

— John Allen Paulos

The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.

— John Allen Paulos