Ulam Quotes

#1. Very soon I discovered that if one gets a feeling for no more than a dozen other radiation and nuclear constants, one can imagine the subatomic world almost tangibly, and manipulate the picture dimensionally and qualitatively, before calculating more precise relationships. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#2. Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad? #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#3. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#4. It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#5. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#6. Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#7. Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#8. What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#9. Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#10. I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#11. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#12. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#13. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#14. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#15. Stan Ulam was lazy, ... He talked too much ... He was self-centered ... He had an overpowering personality. #Quote by Gian-Carlo Rota

#16. 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". #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#17. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#18. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#19. The Bolsheviks did not seize power; they picked it up. #Quote by Adam Ulam

#20. There's nothing new under the sun - everything can be traced
back to Archimedes or even earlier. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#21. In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#22. It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#23. Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#24. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#25. In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug. Chess sometimes plays a similar role. In their unhappiness over the events of this world, some immerse themselves in a kind of self-sufficiency in mathematics. (Some have engaged in it for this reason alone.) #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#26. The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#27. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#28. 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. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#29. I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#30. Mathematics is an escape from reality. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#31. The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer. #Quote by Stanislaw Ulam

#32. The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals. #Quote by James Gleick