Definitions of Mathematics - Playful, Metaphorical, and Poetic Definitions

Playful, Metaphorical, and Poetic Definitions

Bertrand Russell wrote this famous tongue-in-cheek definition, describing the way all terms in mathematics are ultimately defined by reference to undefined terms:

The subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Many other attempts to characterize mathematics have led to humor or poetic prose:

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

Mathematics is the science of skilful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

Mathematics is not a book confined within a cover and bound between brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack; it is not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession, but which fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless as that space which it finds too narrow for its aspirations; its possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze; it is as incapable of being restricted within assigned boundaries or being reduced to definitions of permanent validity, as the consciousness of life, which seems to slumber in each monad, in every atom of matter, in each leaf and bud cell, and is forever ready to burst forth into new forms of vegetable and animal existence.

What is mathematics? What is it for? What are mathematicians doing nowadays? Wasn't it all finished long ago? How many new numbers can you invent anyway? Is today's mathematics just a matter of huge calculations, with the mathematician as a kind of zookeeper, making sure the precious computers are fed and watered? If it's not, what is it other than the incomprehensible outpourings of superpowered brainboxes with their heads in the clouds and their feet dangling from the lofty balconies of their ivory towers? Mathematics is all of these, and none. Mostly, it's just different. It's not what you expect it to be, you turn your back for a moment and it's changed. It's certainly not just a fixed body of knowledge, its growth is not confined to inventing new numbers, and its hidden tendrils pervade every aspect of modern life.