Dusa McDuff Professions : Mathematician Born : October 18, 1945 Browse All Authors Famous Quotes by Dusa McDuff These days people are much more aware that mathematics is a communal endeavor: even the most brilliant idea gets meaning only from its relation to the whole. Dusa McDuff brilliant people ideas Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences! Dusa McDuff math talking ideas Similar Authors Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch mathematician Brahmagupta mathematician Augustus De Morgan mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy mathematician Atle Selberg mathematician Arthur Cayley mathematician All Authors