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Quotes from Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition — Stanislaw Ulam

1909–1984 Poland

← All quotes by Stanislaw Ulam

29 quotes

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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)

I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

As one sharpens a knife on a whetstone, the brain can be sharpened on dull objects of thought. Every form of assiduous thinking has its value.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

I thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

Thoughts are steered in different ways.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stanislaw Ulam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.