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

TOPICS: Platonism, God, philosophy

The creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

—Albert Einstein

TOPICS: creativity, philosophy, Platonism

The laws of mathematics are not merely human inventions or creations. They simply ‘are;’ they exist quite independently of the human intellect. The most that any(one)…can do is to find that they are there and to take cognizance of them.

—M.C. Escher

TOPICS: Platonism, philosophy

I  think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

—Werner Heisenberg

TOPICS: Platonism, philosophy