Jack

“I want to tell her that she's luminous, she's so bright in my mind, sometimes I can't focus.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“So I went to Case, and the Dean of Case says to us, says, it’s a all men’s school, says, “Men, look at, look to the person on your left, and the person on your right. One of you isn’t going to be here next year; one of you is going to fail.” So I get to Case, and again I’m studying all the time, working really hard on my classes, and so for that I had to be kind of a machine.

I, the calculus book that I had, in high school we — in high school, as I said, our math program wasn’t much, and I had never heard of calculus until I got to college. But the calculus book that we had was great, and in the back of the book there were supplementary problems that weren’t, you know, that weren’t assigned by the teacher. The teacher would assign, so this was a famous calculus text by a man named George Thomas, and I mention it especially because it was one of the first books published by Addison-Wesley, and I loved this calculus book so much that later I chose Addison-Wesley to be the publisher of my own book.

But Thomas’s Calculus would have the text, then would have problems, and our teacher would assign, say, the even numbered problems, or something like that. I would also do the odd numbered problems. In the back of Thomas’s book he had supplementary problems, the teacher didn’t assign the supplementary problems; I worked the supplementary problems. I was, you know, I was scared I wouldn’t learn calculus, so I worked hard on it, and it turned out that of course it took me longer to solve all these problems than the kids who were only working on what was assigned, at first. But after a year, I could do all of those problems in the same time as my classmates were doing the assigned problems, and after that I could just coast in mathematics, because I’d learned how to solve problems. So it was good that I was scared, in a way that I, you know, that made me start strong, and then I could coast afterwards, rather than always climbing and being on a lower part of the learning curve.”
― Donald Knuth

“Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvelous machine.”
― Michael Francis Atiyah

“Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments