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Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.
For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
The prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.
If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. -- John D. Barrow, Between Inner Space and Outer Space, Oxford University Press, 1999, p 88.
Suppose we loosely define a religion as any discipline whose foundations rest on an element of faith, irrespective of any element of reason which may be present. [Atheism], for example, would be a religion under this definition. But mathematics would hold the unique position of being the only branch of theology possessing a rigorous demonstration of the fact that it should be so classified. -- H. Eves, Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1969.
The mind of man being finite, when it treats of things which partake of infinity, it is not to be wondered at if it run into absurdities and contradictions, out of which it is impossible it should ever extricate itself, it being of the nature of infinite not to be comprehended by that which is finite. -- George Berkeley
It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning. -- Linus Torvalds