STANISLAW ULAM

People here were willing to assume minor roles for the sake of a common enterprise. This spirit of teamwork must have been characteristic of the 19th century and was what made great industrial empires possible.]

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human events.

Thoughts are steered in different ways.

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.

Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

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.

Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.

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.

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.

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.

Rota's personality is compatible with mine.

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.

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.

I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.

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.

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.

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

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?

I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.

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.

I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate.

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.

The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.