Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.

Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.

I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.

Thoughts are steered in different ways.

The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.

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.

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

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.

It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.

He [John von Neumann] had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem and separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brlliantly simple.

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.

I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.

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.

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

... there's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced back to Archimedes or even earlier.

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.

According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.

Rota's personality is compatible with mine.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.