Mark Kac - Enigmas of Chance

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As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.

Mark Kac
If doing mathematics or science is looked upon as a game, then one might say that in mathematics you compete against yourself or other mathematicians; in physics your adversary is nature and the stakes are higher.

Mark Kac
Steinhaus, with his predilection for metaphors, used to quote a Polish proverb, "Forturny kolem sie tocza " (Luck runs in circles), to explain why pi, so intimately connected with circles, keeps cropping up in probability theory and statistics, the two disciplines which deal with randomness and luck.

Mark Kac
Where there is independence there must be the normal law.

Mark Kac
There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of mathematical creativity. One, akin to conquering a mountain peak, consists of solving a problem which has remained unsolved for a long time and has commanded the attention of many mathematicians. The other is exploring new territory.

Mark Kac
When one is young, and seventeen is very young, one lives in the present. The future, even the near future, is cloaked in unreality.

Mark Kac
In the summer of 1930 my academic future, however, was not uppermost in my mind. I had been stricken by an acute attack of a disease which at regular intervals afflicts all mathematicians and, for that matter, all scientists: I became obsessed by a problem.

Mark Kac
As an introduction to America, my ten months in Baltimore were superb. I find it difficult to find words to convey the feeling of decompression, of freedom, of being caught in a sweep of unimagined and unimaginable grandeur. It was a life on a different scale with more of everything - more air to breathe, more things to see, more people to know.

Mark Kac
Actually, my solution generated considerable further work and the "dog-flea" model keeps cropping up from time to time in unexpected contexts.

Mark Kac
Independence is the central concept of probability theory and few would believe today that understanding what it meant was ever a problem.

Mark Kac
I prefer concrete things and I don't like to learn more about abstract stuff than I absolutely have to.

Mark Kac
There was hardly a page in Markov's book which did not feature the normal law and it cast a spell over me from which I have never fully recovered. Adding to the fascination was the impression that somehow the normal law was the key to mysterious and elusive world of chance phenomena.

Mark Kac
I didn't even try to penetrate the comics, though many years later I came, somewhat grudgingly, to admire Pogo.

Mark Kac
I then reached for a time honored tactic used by mathematicians: if you can't solve the real problem, change it into one you can solve.

Mark Kac
Mathematics is an ancient discipline. For as long as we can reliably reach into the past, we find its development intimately connected with the development of the whole of our civilization. For as long as we have a record of man's curiosity and his quest for understanding, we find mathematics cultivated and cherished, practiced and taught. Throughout the ages it has stood as an ultimate in rational thought and as a monument to man's desire to probe the workings of his own mind.

Mark Kac
I had a phenomenal memory and could recite long poems by Russian poets, mainly Pushkin. Except for an unusual memory, I was not precocious in any respect and somewhat later, to the chagrin of my father, I was inordinately slow learning the multiplication tables.

Mark Kac
Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place.

Mark Kac