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

Categorized in : World Feelings Nuclear

Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations.

Stanislaw Ulam

able important knowing

Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.

Stanislaw Ulam

fifty

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.

Stanislaw Ulam

mathematician physicist littles

The infinite we shall do right away. The finite may take a little longer.

Stanislaw Ulam

infinite may littles

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Stanislaw Ulam

technology race giving

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

Stanislaw Ulam

turned-off formulas littles

Thoughts are steered in different ways.

Stanislaw Ulam

different-ways different way

I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate.

Stanislaw Ulam

agnostic world ideas

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

Stanislaw Ulam

fortresses mathematics challenges

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

giving-up important creative

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

Stanislaw Ulam

exactly-is defining mathematics

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has

Stanislaw Ulam

exactly-is numbers people

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs.

Stanislaw Ulam

pieces paper change

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

Stanislaw Ulam

connections brain may

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

romance girl years

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

Stanislaw Ulam

mathematics possession taken

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

self-confidence brilliant complicated

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

Stanislaw Ulam

theorems elegant matter

He [John von Neumann] had the invaluable faculty of being able to take the most difficult problem and separate it into its components, whereupon everything looked brlliantly simple.

Stanislaw Ulam

learning able simple

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

Stanislaw Ulam

certain technique special