Hungarian Mathematician Quotes

John von Neumann

Paul Erdős

George Pólya

Imre Lakatos

Farkas Bolyai

Cornelius Lanczos

My method to overcome a difficulty is to go round it.

God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of the microwave radiation.

The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.

John von Neumann

Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.

Can the difficulty of an exam be measured by how many bits of information a student would need to pass it? This may not be so absurd in the encyclopedic subjects but in mathematics it doesn't make any sense since things follow from each other and, in principle, whoever knows the bases knows everything. All of the results of a mathematical theorem are in the axioms of mathematics in embryonic form, aren't they?

Mathematics is a human activity almost as diverse as the human mind itself.

It is a well-known experience that the only truly enjoyable and profitable way of studying mathematics is the method of "filling in details" by one's own efforts.

Cornelius Lanczos

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.

In retrospect all great ideas take on a certain simplicity and inevitability, partly because they shape the whole subsequent development of the subject.

It seems to be true that many things have as it were, an epoch in which they are discovered in several places simultaneously, just as the violets appear on all sides in springtime.