Adventures of a Mathematician Quotes

“I remember what seemed to me a bright remark he made after a month's stay in England about the difference between Polish and English "intellectual" conversations. He said that in Poland people talked foolishly about important things, and in England intelligently about foolish or trivial things.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“There must be a trick to the train of thought, a recursive formula. A group of neurons starts working automatically, sometimes without external impulse. It is a kind of iterative process with a growing pattern. It wanders about in the brain, and the way it happens must depend on the memory of similar patterns.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“Some could say it is the external world which has molded our thinking-that is, the operation of the human brain-into what is now called logic. Others-philosophers and scientists alike-say that our logical thought (thinking process?) is a creation of the internal workings of the mind as they developed through evolution "independently" of the action of the outside world. Obviously, mathematics is some of both. It seems to be a language both for the description of the external world, and possibly even more so for the analysis of ourselves. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.
The very existence of mathematics is due to the fact that there exist statements or theorems, which are very simple to state but whose proofs demand pages of explanations. Nobody knows why this should be so. The simplicity of many of these statements has both aesthetic value and philosophical interest.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“the foundations of all rational thought.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“diffidence”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“Von Neumann had this habit of considering the line of least resistance.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“There would be brief spurts of conversation, a few lines would be written on the table, occasional laughter would come from some of the participants, followed by long periods of silence during which we just drank coffee and stared vacantly at each other. The cafe clients at neighboring tables must have been puzzled by these strange doings. It is such persistence and habit of concentration which somehow becomes the most important prerequisite for doing genuinely creative mathematical work.”
― Stanislaw M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“Carson Mark”
― S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician

“Ironically, this first-day problem for Ulam in 1943 would later become a critical part
of Ulam's work with Cornelius Everett in 1950 in which he demonstrated that Teller's design for the Super bomb was impractical.”
― S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician