One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else....

The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is...

Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed...

[Math] curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on.

Before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned—the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted—nature’s answer must be...

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”…”Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″…”And pray, why would this number interest us?””It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One...

Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the...

You get to use your head. People think it’s just whatever cards you get, but there’s a lot of thought involved. There’s math involved, trying to figure out what your chances are compared to others.

We made love like the three minutes between 3:32 and 3:34. My endurance is even worse than my math.

divinity of arithmetic,” through showing that even the methods, which we now take most for granted, were not given to us from on high, but were actually the result of centuries of scientific efforts on...

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or...

I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made...

I’ve always been good at math. It’s straightforward, black-and-white, right and wrong. Equations. Da thought of people as books to be read, but I’ve always thought of them more as formulas—full of variables, but always...

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and...