Quotes About Topology

“Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.”

— Steven L. Peck

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?”

— David Foster Wallace

“It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging into.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Christ Bleeding," Makin said, staring into the valley below us. "How ... " "Topology," I said. "It's a kind of magic.”

— Mark Lawrence

“There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.”

— Edward Witten

“In Einstein's general relativity the structure of space can change but not its topology. Topology is the property of something that doesn't change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don't break anything.”

— Edward Witten

“Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.”

— Henri Poincare

“A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?”

— Jacques Lacan

“I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.”

— Whitfield Diffie

“I know this may sound like an excuse," he said. "But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions."
"Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty.”

— Mark Helprin

“People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.”

— Peter Watts

“The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time.”

— Peter Watts

“Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories.”

— Raymond Louis Wilder

“Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global ...”

— Rene Thom

“Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. "Topology is destiny," he said, and put the drawers on.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Topology and number theory are my faves.”

— Janna Levin

“Commutative algebra is a lot like topology, only backwards.”

— John C. Baez

“Poetry and code - and mathematics - make us read differently from other forms of writing. Written poetry makes the silent reader read three kinds of pattern at once; code moves the reader from a static to an active, interactive and looped domain; while algebraic topology allows us to read qualitative forms and their transformations.”

— Stephanie Strickland

“Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry.”

— Vladimir Arnold

“[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing-one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.”

— Paul Halmos

“Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.”

— R. Buckminster Fuller