Birth of a Theorem Quotes

“Once again I had to put myself in a vulnerable position in order to become stronger.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“I woke up with a start, a little after 5:30 in the morning, to that wonderful feeling that lasts only a fraction of a second, when you don’t know where you are—not even what continent you’re on! I jumped up from the futon and went over to my computer to make a note of the few fragments of the dream I could still hold on to before they completely melted away in the mind’s morning fog. The complexity and the confusion of the adventure put me in a good mood: I take such dreams as a sign that my brain is in good working order.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“Mathematicians, like the poor Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s Arthurian ballad, cannot look at the world directly, only at its reflection—a”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“And John Nash, my mathematical hero, revolutionized analysis and geometry with the proof of three theorems in scarcely more than five years before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia. There is a fine line, it is often said, between genius and madness. Neither of these concepts is well defined, however. And in the case not only of Grothendieck but also of Gödel and Nash, periods of mental derangement, so far from promoting mathematical productivity, actually precluded it. Innate versus acquired, a classic debate. Fischer, Grothendieck, Erdős, and Perelman were all Jewish. Of these, Fischer and Erdős were Hungarian. No one who is familiar with the world of science can have failed to notice how many of the most gifted mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century were Jews, or how many of the greatest geniuses were Hungarian (many”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“line of reasoning by which the detective solves the mystery is more important than the identity of the murderer.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“Suzuki method or no Suzuki method, what matters most of all is the teacher,”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“Non si può progredire se non si accetta di mettersi in posizione vulnerabile”
― Cédric Villani, Il teorema vivente

“Total obscurity. Bilbo in Gollum's tunnel.
A mathematician's first steps into unknown territory constitute the first phase of a familiar cycle.
After the darkness comes a faint, faint glimmer of light, just enough to make you think that something is there, almost within reach, waiting to be discovered . . .
Then, after the faint, faint glimmer, if all goes well, you unravel the thread - and suddenly it's broad daylight! You're full of confidence, you want to tell anyone who will listen about what you've found.
And then, after day has broken, after the sun has climbed high into the sky, a phase of depression inevitably follows. You lose all faith in the importance of what you've achieved. Any idiot could have done what you've done, go find yourself a more worthwhile problem and make something of your life. Thus the cycle of mathematical research . . .”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“method developed by John Nash and Jürgen Moser is one of the pillars of the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theory that Étienne had mentioned. I also knew that Nash–Moser relies on Newton’s extraordinary iteration scheme for finding successively better approximations to the roots of real-valued equations—a method that converges unimaginably fast, exponentially exponentially fast!—and that Kolmogorov was able to exploit it with remarkable ingenuity. Frankly, I couldn’t see any connection whatever between these things and Landau damping. But who knows, I muttered to myself, perhaps Étienne’s intuition will turn out to be correct.…”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“In the 1950s, John Nash disrupted the balance between geometry and analysis when he discovered that the abstract geometric problem of isometric embedding could be solved by the fine “peeling” of partial differential equations.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“Any idiot could have done what you’ve done, go find yourself a more worthwhile problem and make something of your life.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure

“If Nash attracted Hollywood’s attention, it wasn’t only on account of his mathematical exploits. It was also because of the tragic story of his life. At the age of thirty he succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia. In and out of psychiatric clinics and hospitals for more than ten years, he seemed fated to live out his days as a pitiable phantom haunting the halls of Princeton, his mind an incoherent ruin. But then, after three decades of purgatory, Nash miraculously came back from the far shores of madness. Today, more than eighty years old, he is as normal as you or I. Except that there is an aura about him that neither you nor I have, an aura due to phenomenal accomplishments, strokes of pure genius—and a way of dissecting and scrutinizing problems that makes Nash a model for all modern analysts, myself most humbly among them.”
― Cédric Villani, Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure