14 quotes
I then reached for a time honored tactic used by mathematicians: if you can't solve the real problem, change it into one you can solve.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Actually, my solution generated considerable further work and the "dog-flea" model keeps cropping up from time to time in unexpected contexts.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Independence is the central concept of probability theory and few would believe today that understanding what it meant was ever a problem.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Where there is independence there must be the normal law.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
I prefer concrete things and I don't like to learn more about abstract stuff than I absolutely have to.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
When one is young, and seventeen is very young, one lives in the present. The future, even the near future, is cloaked in unreality.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Ehrenfest model
Actually, my solution generated considerable further work and the "dog-flea" model keeps cropping up from time to time in unexpected contexts.
I didn't even try to penetrate the comics, though many years later I came, somewhat grudgingly, to admire Pogo.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Unrestricted abstraction tends to divert attention from whole areas of application whose very discovery depends of the features that the abstract point of view rules out as being accidental.
As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of mathematical creativity. One, akin to conquering a mountain peak, consists of solving a problem which has remained unsolved for a long time and has commanded the attention of many mathematicians. The other is exploring new territory.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
In the summer of 1930 my academic future, however, was not uppermost in my mind. I had been stricken by an acute attack of a disease which at regular intervals afflicts all mathematicians and, for that matter, all scientists: I became obsessed by a problem.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)
As an introduction to America, my ten months in Baltimore were superb. I find it difficult to find words to convey the feeling of decompression, of freedom, of being caught in a sweep of unimagined and unimaginable grandeur. It was a life on a different scale with more of everything - more air to breathe, more things to see, more people to know.
Enigmas Of Chance (1985)