Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

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About Stanislaw Ulam

Stanisław Marcin Ulam (April 13, 1909 – May 13, 1984) was a Polish-American mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project and proposed the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. He also invented nuclear pulse propulsion and developed a number of mathematical tools in number theory, set theory, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.

Born: April 13th, 1909

Died: May 13th, 1984

Categories: Mathematicians, Poles, Americans, 1980s deaths, Agnostics

Quotes: 35 sourced quotes total (includes 2 about)

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I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 275
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
As one sharpens a knife on a whetstone, the brain can be sharpened on dull objects of thought. Every form of assiduous thinking has its value.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 278
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
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.
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...
Thoughts are steered in different ways.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 275
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.
Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 277
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 273-274
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
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 affairs.
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.
Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.
Stanislaw Ulam
• as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota in Words spoken at the memorial service for S. M. Ulam (The Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, May 17, 1984), published in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 6, Number 4 / December, 1984
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes)
According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.
I thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.
The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.
I am always amazed how much a certain facility with a special and apparently narrow technique can accomplish.
The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.
It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.
Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.
Stanislaw Ulam
• In Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, Ch. 3, p. 94; as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (Springer, 2008), p. 861
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes)
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.
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.
Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.
Stanislaw Ulam
• Chapter 2, Student Years, p. 45 (On Ada Halpern...)
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
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.
The first sign of senility is that a man forgets his theorems, the second sign is that he forgets to zip up, the third sign is that he forgets to zip down.
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?
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.
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.
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
• Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
With his unusual looks and magnetic green eyes, he always seemed to stand out in a crowd. I remember a party years later when Georgia O'Keefe pointed an imperious finger in his direction and exclaimed "Who is that man?"
About Stanislaw Ulam
• Mrs. Françoise Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, Postscript To Adventures, p. 306
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes about 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.
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.
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
• Chapter 7, The University of Wisconsin, p. 125
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes, Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991))
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".
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.
Engraved on my memory is the day when I found him at noon staring intensely out of a window in our living room with a strange expression on his face. Peering unseeing into the garden, he said "I found a way to make it work." "What work?" I asked. "The Super" he replied. "It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history."
About Stanislaw Ulam
• Mrs. Françoise Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, Postscript To Adventures, p. 311
• Source: Wikiquote: "Stanislaw Ulam" (Quotes about Stanislaw Ulam)

End Stanislaw Ulam Quotes