Quote

How many pizzas are consumed each year in the United States? How many words have you spoken in your life? How many different peoples names appear in the New York Times each year? How many watermelons would fit inside the U.S. Capital building? What is the volume of all the human blood in the world?

John Allen Paulos

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John Allen Paulos
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: July 4
Mathematician
Professor Of Mathematics
University Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Human
Building
Uncertainty
Watermelons
Humans
Blood
Capital
Ontology
Many
Names
Certainty
Pizza
Different
Year
Appear
Consumed
Years
United
Logic
Peoples
Would
Times
Fit
Volume
Life
Words
York
Spoken
World
States
Inside
Reasoning
Pizzas

More quotes by John Allen Paulos

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Defined broadly enough, mathematics encompasses everything.
John Allen Paulos
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One must give up the fantasy of a perspicacious gunslinger/investor outwitting the market.
John Allen Paulos
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In the stock market... You can be right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons.
John Allen Paulos
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There is something inhuman and vaguely pornographic about statistics... Pornography, on the other hand, with its loosely bound sequences of storyless sexual couplings often has the feel of a statistical survey.
John Allen Paulos
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The simple equations that generate the convoluted Mandelbrot fractal have been called the wittiest remarks ever made.
John Allen Paulos
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The fashion pages have always baffled me. In my opinion, the articles appear to be full of gobbledygook as to make the astrology column seem factual by comparison.
John Allen Paulos
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The only bit of logic-based public bathroom humor I know is: the difference between men and women is that between the statement [P and not Q] and the statement [Q and not P].
John Allen Paulos
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Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!
John Allen Paulos
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Mathematicians are a bit like the laconic Vermonter who, when asked if he's lived in the state his whole life, replies, Not yet.
John Allen Paulos
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I used to be surprised and even depressed when I met someone I had admired and discovered him or her to be a jerk or, perhaps worse, rather common. Now I half expect this reaction and even find it a little reassuring, maybe even uplifting. Isn't it amazing that somebody like that could produce such and such.
John Allen Paulos
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The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are on the floor.
John Allen Paulos
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When asked why he doesn't believe in astrology, the logician Raymond Smullyan responds that he's a Gemini and Geminis never believe in astrology.
John Allen Paulos
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Uncertainty would be the only certainty there's, and realizing how to stay with insecurity could be the only protection
John Allen Paulos
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I think, therefore I laugh.
John Allen Paulos
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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