5 Quotes by Shing-Tung Yau

A lot of the mathematics discoveries occur through lucky accidents like that, [Calabi notes]. It's often a matter of connecting up ideas that might seem unrelated and then exploiting the newfound connection.

Microchip manufactures, similarly, cannot make their transistors too thin, or the performance of these devices will suffer from electon leakage due to tunneling effects.

Calabi-Yau manifolds, like math itself, are developing stories on a road that undoubtedly holds many twists and turns. It means there's always more to be learned, always more to be done. And for those of us who worry about keeping employed, keeping engaged, and keeping amused, it means there should be plenty of challenges, as well as fun, in the years ahead.

Although that might seem inconsetuqntial, a 1 percent difference can be significantly big in cosmology. And the recently launched Planck observatory should be able to make spectral index measurements to at least that level of sensitivity.

I'd only worked out a few of them myself and was never good at computer calculations. But in light of Candela's achievement and the output of his computer, the notion of a large number of manifolds was no longer abstract or merely an estimate made by a partisan mathematician. It was a fact, and if you have any doubts on the subject, you need to look no further than Candela's published database.