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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.

Stanislaw Ulam

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Stanislaw Ulam
Age: 75 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 13
Died: 1984
Died: May 13
Mathematician
Lemberg
Austria
Stanislaw Ulam
Stanisław Marcin Ulam
Able
Faculty
Everything
Separate
Take
John
Looked
Learning
Whereupon
Simple
Invaluable
Difficult
Components
Problem
Programming

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I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.
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Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.
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It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.
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... there's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced back to Archimedes or even earlier.
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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.
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Rota's personality is compatible with mine.
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Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
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One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.
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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.
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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 the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.
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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.
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Thoughts are steered in different ways.
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Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.
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It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.
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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.
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