Occupation: Mathematician Birth: March 3, 1916 Death: October 2, 2006
The best way to learn is to do; the worst way to teach is to talk..
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….
The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces..
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….
A clever graduate student could teach Fourier something new, but surely no one claims that he could teach Archimedes to reason better..
Mathematics - this may surprise or shock some - is never deductive in creation..
The most spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his ….
If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and ….
Applied mathematics will always need pure mathematics just as anteaters will always need ants..
What's the best part of being a mathematician? I'm not a religious man, but it's almost like being in touch with God when you're thinking about mathe….
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics..
Feller was an ebullient man, who would rather be wrong than undecided..
When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask..
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….
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, ….
The heart of mathematics is its problems..
...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….
It saddens me that educated people don't even know that my subject exists..
The heart of mathematics consists of concrete examples and concrete problems. Big general theories are usually afterthoughts based on small but profo….
A smooth lecture... may be pleasant; a good teacher challenges, asks, irritates and maintains high standards - all that is generally not pleasant..
The beginner should not be discouraged if he finds he does not have the prerequisites for reading the prerequisites..