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I had been struggling for two months to prove a result I was pretty sure was true. When I was walking up a Swiss mountain, fully occupied by the effort, a very odd device emerged - so odd that, though it worked, I could not grasp the resulting proof as a whole. But not only so; I had a sense that my subconscious was saying, 'Are you never going to do it, confound you; try this.

— John Edensor Littlewood Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

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More quotes by John Edensor Littlewood

However appalling the mess, I feel that to scrap this page would somehow break threads in the unconscious.

Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

'The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.'

Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

Landau kept a printed form for dealing with proofs of Fermat's last theorem. 'On page blank, lines blank to blank, you will find there is a mistake.'

Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

It was Mr. Littlewood (I believe) who remarked that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends."

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