Occupation: Mathematician Birth: March 3, 1916 Death: October 2, 2006
The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces..
The joy of suddenly learning a former secret and the joy of suddenly discovering a hitherto unknown truth are the same to me - both have the flash of….
The mathematical fraternity is a little like a self-perpetuating priesthood. The mathematicians of today teach the mathematicians of tomorrow and, in….
The best way to learn is to do; the worst way to teach is to talk..
...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of s….
Mathematics - this may surprise or shock some - is never deductive in creation..
It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts..
I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a p….
Feller was an ebullient man, who would rather be wrong than undecided..
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics. That tenet is the foundation of the do-it-yourself, Socratic, or Texas method..
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics..
A smooth lecture... may be pleasant; a good teacher challenges, asks, irritates and maintains high standards - all that is generally not pleasant..
Applied mathematics will always need pure mathematics just as anteaters will always need ants..
It saddens me that educated people don't even know that my subject exists..
A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept,and when I want to learn something new, ….
Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the conver….
The heart of mathematics is its problems..
Many teachers are concerned about the amount of material they must cover in a course. One cynic suggested a formula: since, he said, students on the ….
Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reas….
Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork..
The heart of mathematics consists of concrete examples and concrete problems. Big general theories are usually afterthoughts based on small but profo….