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Philip J. Davis
(2 Jan 1923 - )
[n] who began at the National Bureau of Standards but spent the rest of his career as a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. His first book was The Lore of Large Numbers (1961) and he wrote or co-authored over a dozen more by the time he retired.
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Science Quotes by Philip J. Davis (5 quotes)
An intelligent observer seeing mathematicians at work might conclude that they are devotees of exotic sects, pursuers of esoteric keys to the universe.
— Philip J. Davis
Co-author with Reuben Hersh, in The Mathematical Experience (1981), 111.
Everybody is to some small extent a philosopher of mathematics. Let him only exclaim on occasion: “But figures can’t lie!” and he joins the ranks of Plato and of Lakatos.
— Philip J. Davis
Co-author with Reuben Hersh, in The Mathematical Experience (1981), xi.
One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists’ war, World War II was the physicists’ war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians’ war.
— Philip J. Davis
Co-author with and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience (1981), 96.
One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.
— Philip J. Davis
In 'Number', Scientific American (Sep 1964), 211, No. 3, 55.
The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.
— Philip J. Davis
Excerpt from address by Davis to a scientific society, 'The Philadelphia Story' collected in Philip Davis and William G. Chinn, 3.146 and All That (1985), 64. The context is the result of a "take a number" ticket used to organize a train station crowd competing for available taxis. Instead of chaos from queue jumping, the dispatcher used the ticket numbers for the loading order as each taxi pulled up.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
