32 Quotes by Stanislaw Ulam

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.

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

Sometimes I feel that a more rational explanation for all that has happened during my lifetime is that I am still only thirteen years old, reading Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, and have fallen asleep.

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.

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

According to recent studies, at least one star out of three is multiple.

For many years I was the youngest among my mathematical friends. It makes me melancholy to realize that I now have become the oldest in most groups of scientists.

I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.