The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e , where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now.

A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.

One of the reasons I like working with schools is to try to convince women that they can be scientists and that science can be fun.

Dogs are my favorite people.

Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy.

The main thing is, you just want to have your place in history. You hope that people will look back on it in 15, 20, 30 and beyond years, and say, "That was an exciting film."

Why do people think being with someone is the answer to everything?

You don't know how easy death is. It's - it's like a door. A person simply walks through it, and she's lost to you forever.

There are a lot of women like me in the world, and we rarely get to see ourselves.

I am flattered to have been the woman to have opened the door for female rockers to be accepted into the mainly male industry.