Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Stanislaw Ulam
Age: 75 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 13
Died: 1984
Died: May 13
Mathematician
Lemberg
Austria
Stanislaw Ulam
Stanisław Marcin Ulam
Simple
Invaluable
Difficult
Components
Problem
Programming
Able
Faculty
Everything
Separate
Take
John
Looked
Learning
Whereupon
More quotes by Stanislaw Ulam
In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.
Stanislaw Ulam
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
The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.
Stanislaw Ulam
Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.
Stanislaw Ulam
It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.
Stanislaw Ulam
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.
Stanislaw Ulam
It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.
Stanislaw Ulam
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.
Stanislaw Ulam
Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.
Stanislaw Ulam
Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
Stanislaw Ulam
What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics it is always something else.
Stanislaw Ulam
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
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
Thoughts are steered in different ways.
Stanislaw Ulam
... there's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced back to Archimedes or even earlier.
Stanislaw Ulam
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
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
I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.
Stanislaw Ulam
Rota's personality is compatible with mine.
Stanislaw Ulam
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
