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 Heinz Pagel 
Profession: physicist, author. Born 1939. Died 1988. The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that nations and people that master the new science of complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.
Blaise Pascal
Profession: mathematician. ... engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified.
He is very intelligent but he is not a mathematician: this as you know is a great defect.
(Source: From a letter of Pascal to Fermat)
Humble thyself, impotent reason!
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.
Karl Pearson
The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.
Rozso Peter
I love mathematics ... principally because it is beautiful, because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game – the encompassing of the infinite.
Ivars Peterson
Profession: writer. To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.
J. Phillips
Students must learn that mathematics is the most human of endeavors. Flesh and blood representatives of their own species engaged in a centuries long creative struggle to uncover and to erect this magnificent edifice. And the struggle goes on today. On the very campuses where mathematics is presented and received as an inhuman discipline, cold and dead, new mathematics is created. As sure as the tides.
Jean Piaget
Profession: psychologist. A child[’s] ... first geometrical discoveries are topological ... If you ask him to copy a square or a triangle, he draws a closed circle.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.
James Pierpont
The notion of infinity is our greatest friend; it is also the greatest enemy of our peace of mind.
Charles Pinter
Mathematicians study structure independent of context, and their science is a voyage of exploration through all the kinds of structure and order which the human mind is capable of discerning.
Plato
Profession: philosopher, mathematician. Geometry existed before the creation.
God ever geometrizes.
He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant that the diagonal of a square is incommensurate with its side.
He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.
[Inscription above Plato's Academy:] Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.
No nature except an extraordinary one could ever easily formulate a theory.
Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself.
Then, my noble friend, geometry will draw the soul towards truth, and create the spirit of philosophy, and raise up that which is not unhappily allowed to fall down.
(Source: The Republic, VII. 522-528, “Quadrivium”)
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