John Edensor Littlewood Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

I constantly meet people who are doubtful, generally without due reason, about their potential capacity [as mathematicians]. The first test is whether you got anything out of geometry. To have disliked or failed to get on with other [mathematical] subjects need mean nothing; much drill and drudgery is unavoidable before they can get started, and bad teaching can make them unintelligible even to a born mathematician.

John Edensor Littlewood
A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

John Edensor Littlewood
A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

John Edensor Littlewood
I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.

John Edensor Littlewood
I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said...' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud....)

John Edensor Littlewood
It was Mr. Littlewood (I believe) who remarked that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends."

John Edensor Littlewood
'The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it—would.'

John Edensor Littlewood
It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse chance was 1:10. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad, and then this particular event would be quite likely.

John Edensor Littlewood
The higher mental activities are pretty tough and resilient, but it is a devastating experience if the drive does stop. Some people lose it in their forties and can only stop. In England they are a source of Vice-Chancellors.

John Edensor Littlewood
A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e, where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

John Edensor Littlewood
In presenting a mathematical argument the great thing is to give the educated reader the chance to catch on at once to the momentary point and take details for granted: two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse). The unpractised writer, even after the dawn of a conscience, gives him no such chance; before he can spot the point he has to tease his way through a maze of symbols of which not the tiniest suffix can be skipped.

John Edensor Littlewood
It is possible for a mathematician to be "too strong" for a given occasion. He forces through, where another might be driven to a different, and possible more fruitful, approach. (So a rock climber might force a dreadful crack, instead of finding a subtle and delicate route.)

John Edensor Littlewood
Most of the best work starts in hopeless muddle and floundering, sustained on the "smell" that something is there.

John Edensor Littlewood
The theory of numbers is particularly liable to the accusation that some of its problems are the wrong sort of questions to ask. I do not myself think the danger is serious; either a reasonable amount of concentration leads to new ideas or methods of obvious interest, or else one just leaves the problem alone. "Perfect numbers" certainly never did any good, but then they never did any particular harm.

John Edensor Littlewood
The referee said it was not acceptable, but the Press considered they could not refuse to publish a book by a professor of the university.

John Edensor Littlewood