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"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics"--Siméon Poisson |
Landau, Susan
There's a touch of the priesthood in the academic world, a sense that a scholar should
not be distracted by the mundane tasks of day-to-day living. I used to have great
stretches of time to work. Now I have research thoughts while making peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches. Sure it's impossible to write down ideas while reading "curious
George" to a two-year-old. On the other hand, as my husband was leaving graduate
school for his first job, his thesis advisor told him, "You may wonder how a
professor gets any research done when one has to teach, advise students, serve on
committees, referee papers, write letters of recommendation, interview prospective
faculty. Well, I take long showers."
In Her Own Words: Six Mathematicians Comment on Their Lives and Careers. Notices of
the AMS, V. 38, no. 7 (September 1991), p. 704.
This page points to a collection of mathematical quotations culled from
many sources. You may conduct a keyword search through the quotation database by clicking here.
Now, By popular demand, you may download the whole collection at once.
(It's about 243k...83 printed pages or so.)
Follow this link to download the entire collection.
Of course, you may also access the quotations "page by page". They are organized in alphabetic order by the author's last name. Enjoy!
Follow this link for a random quotation from the
collection. The randomizer was written by
Jack Siler.
If you have comments, corrections or suggestions, about either the quotations, their sources, or about these pages in general, please email them to Mark Woodard at Mark.Woodard@furman.edu These pages are located at the mathematics department at Furman University
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