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Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

— John von Neumann

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Source, in full

Reply, according to Dr. Felix T. Smith of Stanford Research Institute, to a physicist friend who had said "I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics," as quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979) by Gary Zukav, Bantam Books, p. 208, footnote.

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Mathematics

More quotes by John von Neumann

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

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Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John von Neumann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.