Top 40 Jordan Ellenberg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Math, like meditation, puts you in direct contact with the universe, which is bigger than you, was here before you, and will be here after you.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

2. “In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

3. “Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

4. “It’s not wrong to say Hilbert was a genius. But it’s more right to say that what Hilbert accomplished was genius. Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

5. “The ultimate reason for teaching kids to write a proof is not that the world is full of proofs. It’s that the world is full of non-proofs, and grown-ups need to know the difference.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

6. “A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

7. “There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

8. “Mathematicians can be persnickety about logical niceties. We’re the kind of people who think it’s funny, when asked, “Do you want soup or salad with that?” to reply, “Yes.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

9. “You can do linear regression without thinking about whether the phenomenon you’re modeling is actually close to linear. But you shouldn’t.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

10. “Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

11. “Don’t talk about percentages of numbers when the numbers might be negative.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

12. “Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

13. “A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

14. “Mathematics is common sense.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

15. “If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don’t worry – probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else’s. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That’s how conspiracy theories work.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

16. “Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, “Let’s face it, I’m smarter than Gauss.” And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

17. “To do mathematics is to be, at once, touched by fire and bound by reason.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

18. “I think we need more math majors who don’t become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won’t get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

19. “Yes, the existence of human life is evidence for the existence of God; but it’s much better evidence that our world was programmed by people much smarter than us.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

20. “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn’t occur to you to consider.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

21. “A mathematician is always asking, “What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?”

— Jordan Ellenberg

22. “When you reason correctly, as Silver does, you find that you always think you’re right, but you don’t think you’re always right.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

23. “Maybe individual people seem irrational because they aren’t really individuals! Each one of us is a little nation-state, doing our best to settle disputes and broker compromises between the squabbling voices that drive us.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

24. “Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying “huh,” but rather making a firm assertion: “I’m not sure, this is why I’m not sure, and this is roughly how not-sure I am.” Or even more: “I’m unsure, and you should be too.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

25. “Improbable things happen a lot.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

26. “If you’ve ever run an experiment, you know scientific truth doesn’t pop out of the clouds blowing a flaming trumpet at you. Data is messy, and inference is hard.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

27. “You can’t write a sonnet if you have to look up the spelling of each word as you go.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

28. “He was unsweaty, undusty, and unbloody, but he was right. He was a critic who counted.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

29. “The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we’d now call mathematics, things we’d now call religion, and things we’d now call mental illness.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

30. “The master group theorist John Conway, upon encountering the lattice in 1968, worked out all its symmetries in a twelve-hour spree of computation on a single giant roll of paper. These symmetries ended up forming some of the final pieces of the general theory of finite symmetry groups that preoccupied algebraists for much of the twentieth century.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

31. “One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don’t win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

32. “Public opinion doesn’t exist. More precisely, it exists sometimes, concerning matters about which there’s a clear majority view.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

33. “Nowadays, the Abrahamic argument – just look at everything, how could it all be so awesome if there weren’t a designer behind it? – has been judged wanting, at least in most scientific circles. But then again, now we have microscopes and telescopes and computers. We are not restricted to gaping at the moon from our cribs. We have data, lots of data, and we have the tools to mess with it.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

34. “Mathematics, mostly, is a communal enterprise, each advance the product of a huge network of minds working toward a common purpose, even if we accord special honor to the person who places the last stone in the arch.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

35. “One of the great joys of mathematics is the incontrovertible feeling that you’ve understood something the right way, all the way down to the bottom; it’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in any other sphere of mental life. And when you know how to do something the right way, it’s hard-for some stubborn people, impossible-to make yourself explain it the wrong way.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

36. “We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

37. “Big Data isn’t magic, and it doesn’t tell the feds who’s a terrorist and who’s not. But it doesn’t have to be magic to generate long lists of people who are in some ways red-flagged, elevated-risk, “people of interest.” Most of the people on those lists will have nothing to do with terrorism. How confident are you that you’re not one of them?”

— Jordan Ellenberg

38. “Mark Twain is good on this: “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

39. “Cauchy was not interested in the needs of engineers. Cauchy was interested in the truth.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

40. “You can explain it to a Congressman in six minutes and he can talk about it for six months.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

41. “It’s not always wrong to be wrong.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

42. “The paradox of education: what we most admire we put in a box and make dull.”

— Jordan Ellenberg

43. “People often complain that no one likes facts and numbers and reason and science anymore, but as someone who talks about those things in public, I can tell you that’s not true. People love numbers, and are impressed by them, sometimes more than they should be.”

— Jordan Ellenberg