38 quotes
Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
Thoughts are steered in different ways.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Stanislaw Ulam
It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.
Ivy Mike
It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.
Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt "strange inside" two or three times during my life.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate...
There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)
In conversations, some quite recent, on the present status of the foundations of mathematics, von Neumann seemed to imply that in his view, the story is far from having been told. Gödel's discovery should lead to a new approach to the understanding of the role of formalism in mathematics, rather than be considered as closing the subject.
As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.
Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)