32 Quotes by Stanislaw Ulam

"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."

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

"There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call “habitual luck”."

"Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?"

"Rota’s personality is compatible with mine."

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

"Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships."

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

"Thoughts are steered in different ways."

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