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…This formidable fellow [Feynman] walked out of the building with me, and said as we were parting, “Do you know calculus?”
I admitted that I didn’t
“You had better learn it,” he said. “It’s the language God talks.”
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After that I did make several separate attempts to learn calculus…I picked up and skimmed freshman texts in college bookstores, hoping to come across one that might help a mathematical ignoramus like me, who had spent his college years in the humanities — i.e., literature and philosophy — in an adolescent quest for the meaning of existence, little knowing that calculus, which I had heard of as a difficult bore leading nowhere, was the language God talks; or as one noted Jewish microbiologist, also a Torah scholar, commented to me with a grin, “His other language.”
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Newton summed up his lifework in well-known words:
I know not what I seem to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
It was this child having fun on the beach who came upon the smoother pebble called the calculus (oddly, the word means “pebble”), enabling thinkers after him to venture far out on that ocean of truth, toward a distant shore of final theory which, as they keep learning to their gloomy puzzlement, ever recedes. Isaac Newton not only found Feynman’s “language God talks,” he also mastered God’s other language, and studied and wrote on the Hebrew Bible, a fact that embarrasses some scientists. Newton put Feynman’s dictum on calculus, which he called “fluxions,” in plain words suited to his own faith, “God created everything by number, weight, and measure.” An agnostic paraphrase for our day might be, “All that is truly knowable is knowable only by number, weight, and measure.” Or as James Jeans put it, “God is a mathematician.”
(This is what James Jeans really said.)
The Mysterious Universe (1930), James Jeans
From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. p. 134, 1930 ed.
The Bible and meaningful books 