To what extent does mathematics itself function as a religion. Insofar — Mathematics and mysticism

"What English mathematicians were most intrigued by and, at times, embarrassed about was the explanation Ramanujan offered regarding his methodology for arriving at solutions. A devout Hindu, Ramanujan claimed he derived most of his solutions with the help of the goddess Namgiri. He claimed that "an equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God," and the quantity 2n-1 stood for "the primordial God and several divinities." ...Ramanujan was unable to provide any explanation of his "methodology" in formal mathematical terms."

"A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow."

"[Hardy had a] profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this that made his friends... think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion."

"The word witr literally means "odd number," and tradition says: "God is odd, He loves the odd" Musalmaans pay the greatest respect to an odd number It is considered unlucky to begin any work, or to commence a journey on a day, the date of which is an odd number"

"Newtons goal was incomparably more vast than the discovery of the "mathematical principles of natural philosophy." Newton wished to penetrate the divine principles beyond the veil of nature, and beyond the veils of human record and received revelation as well. His goal was the knowledge of God, and for achieving that goal he marshaled the evidence from every source available to him: mathematics, experiment, observation, reason, revelation, historical method, myth, the tattered remnants of ancient wisdom. ...one result of the restricted interests of modernity has been to look askance at Newtons biblical, chronological, and alchemical studies: to consider his pursuit of prisca sapientia [ancient wisdom] as irrelevant. None of those was irrelevant to Newton, for his goal was considerably more ambitious than a knowledge of nature. His goal was Truth, and for that he utilized every possible resource."

"A fifteenth century trend toward Platonic and Pythagorean mysticism, accompanying the growth of humanism over... earlier Scholastic philosophy, encouraged the previously denied use of the infinite and infinitesimal in geometry. As a result... mathematics was viewed as independent of the senses, not bound by empirical investigations, and thus free to use the infinitite and infinitesimal, provided that no inconsistencies resulted. By the early seventeenth century this view opened up bold new approaches."