"In certain of their aspects, as well as in the attitudes of their practitioners, there is a close analogy between religion and mathematics. To some of its practitioners, religion represents an ideal essentially superpersonal, existing independently of its devotees; to others, it affords rules by which to live, having no intellectual content whatever. And like religion, mathematics traces its beginnings back to prehistoric primitive cultures, as a result of which the numbers with which we count, the so-called "natural numbers"... are frequently regarded in a mystical fashion not ordinarily associated... Also like religion, mathematics furnishes a fascinating study from an anthropological viewpoint, only the meagre beginnings of which are to be found in antropological literature—a gap which I am hoping to help fill..."
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, "The Nature of Modern Mathematics," The Evolution of the Science of Numbers, Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, Vol. 65, 1958-1959, p. 302.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_mysticism
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Mathematics and mysticism
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