Stanislaw Ulam - Adventures of a Mathematician (1976)

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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
It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

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

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

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

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.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

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

Stanislaw Ulam
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".

Stanislaw Ulam
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
I thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam
Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

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

Stanislaw Ulam
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?

Stanislaw Ulam
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
The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.

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

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam
It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.

Stanislaw Ulam
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.

Stanislaw Ulam