# David Berlinski

- Quotes: 8
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski

## Books

- [A Tour of the Calculus](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus.md) — 8 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that + = an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

p. 38 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/in-the-twelfth.md)

> I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances.

p. 313 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/i-have-written.md)

> Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after they have been completed, I am where I started, having done something but accomplished little, a useful metaphor for a great many activities in life.

p. 220 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/stepping-forward-i-step.md)

> The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.

p. 165 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/the-derivative-is-an-artifact.md)

> Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say.
>
> “Remember me.”

p. 149 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/then-he-said.md)

> A mathematical argument, once understood, is in its capacity to compel belief a miracle of enlightened life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/a-mathematical-argument.md)

> “Any idiot,” he said calmly but with immense conviction, “can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience.”

p. 281 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/any-idiot-he-said.md)

> It is here, at this very moment when the first utterly trivial differential equation is solved, that the secret form of words is revealed that makes modern science possible.

p. 230 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-berlinski/a-tour-of-the-calculus/it-is-here.md)