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Stanislaw Ulam
33 quotes
“The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Ergodic Behavior of Dynamical Systems (LA-2055, May 10, 1955) in
“Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota in Words spoken at the memorial service for S. M. Ulam (The Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, May 17, 1984), published in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 6, Number 4 / December, 1984
“The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems, the second sign is that he forgets to zip up, the third sign is that he forgets to zip down.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Though Erdős used this remark, it is said to have originated with his friend Stanisław Ulam, as reported in The Man Who Loved Only Numbers : The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth (1998) by Paul H…
Also quoted by: Paul Erdős (misattributed)
“I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate...”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as quoted by Olgierd Budrewicz in The melting-pot revisited: twenty well-known Americans of Polish background, publish by Interpress, page 36, 1977.
“Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, Ch. 3, p. 94; as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (Springer, 2008), p. 861
“Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface To the 1983 Edition, p. xxvii
“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thinking very hard about the same problem for several hours can produce a severe fatigue, close to a breakdown. I never really experienced a breakdown, but have felt "strange inside" two or three times during my life.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a mathematician, von Neumann was quick, brilliant, efficient, and enormously broad in scientific interests beyond mathematics itself. He knew his technical abilities; his virtuosity in following complicated reasoning and his insights were supreme; yet he lacked absolute self confidence.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With sixty professors there are roughly eighteen hundred pairs of professors. Out of that many pairs it was not surprising that there were some whose members did not like one another.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (1989) , p. 169
Also quoted by: Richard Feynman
“I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As one sharpens a knife on a whetstone, the brain can be sharpened on dull objects of thought. Every form of assiduous thinking has its value.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thoughts are steered in different ways.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.”
Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) said by 1984 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source