A Quote by David Hilbert
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
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If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
Football is not played on paper, it is played on a pitch. This game is not mathematics and in football, two plus two very rarely equals four - it's usually three or five.
Life to me is the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game, a game to be taken lightly, and a game in which the rules don't matter much. The rules matter a great deal. The game has to be played fairly or it is no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honorably and splendidly.
Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it's no longer baseball.
Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.
Football is the love of my life. I would never say I don't want to play. Somebody could say that this game is meaningless. Who is it meaningless to? I guess people who are watching the game? Or the people who are playing it? It's definitely not meaningless to us.
The reason I am here, they tell me, is that I played the game a certain way, that I played the game the way it was supposed to be played.
The easiest thing in the world is to succeed. You can't help it if you follow the rules and play the game the best way you know how according to yourself, instead of according to the one next to you, or above you, or somewhere away from you.
Let me give you a few simple rules for learning to draw. First, see of what shape the whole thing is. Next, put in the line that marks the movement of the whole. Don't have more than one movement in a figure; you can't patch parts together. Simple lines; then simple values. Establish the fact of the whole. Is it square, oblong, cube, or what is it?
What's the game coming to? Evidently the guys making all these rules never played the game of baseball.
When One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks, not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.
The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The laws of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.
On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.
I'm not the sort of person who does my mathematics writing on paper. I do that at the last stage of the game. I do my mathematics in my head. I sit down for a hard day's work and I write nothing all day. I just think. And I walk up and down because that helps keep me awake, it keeps the blood circulating, and I think and think.
But there is another reason for the high repute of mathematics: it is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.
I don't think cricket is a game that people who have never played or been involved in understand the excitement. It's a game that is full of excitement, because cricket lovers follow the game and understand the basic principles and rules. They become connoisseurs of the game.
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