Gian Carlo Rota Quotes

#1. Life shifting, as life does

Luis Alberto Urrea

#2. Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#3. How did he do it? He must be a genius!

Gian-Carlo Rota

#4. Very little mathematics has direct applications - though fortunately most of it has plenty of indirect ones.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#5. A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

Jean Giraudoux

#6. The advice we give others is the advice that we ourselves need.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#7. President Obama's FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has a reputation in D.C. of being a 'tepid' regulator. From reports of his net neutrality proposal, he's living up to that reputation.

Marvin Ammori

#8. Stan Ulam was lazy, ... He talked too much ... He was self-centered ... He had an overpowering personality.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#9. If we have no idea why a statement is true, we can still prove it by induction.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#10. [In mathematics] There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#11. I don't really take myself very seriously.

Brittany Murphy

#12. There is something in statistics that makes it very similar to astrology.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#13. Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#14. In the course of your journey it is most likely that your day-to-day companions or friends may change. Some may fall away as your interest in the Spirit pulls you from the worldly interest which brought or kept you together, but new friends who share your current interests will appear. Of

Ram Dass

#15. Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different.

Herbie Hancock

#16. All that Hubert needs over there is a gal to answer the phone and a pencil with an eraser on it.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#17. The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#18. The apex of mathematical achievement occurs when two or more fields which were thought to be entirely unrelated turn out to be closely intertwined. Mathematicians have never decided whether they should feel excited or upset by such events.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#19. He really paid tribute to the people who are willing to risk their own lives to fight injustice - they are greater men and women than I.

Rachel Weisz

#20. Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#21. A technique is a trick that works.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#22. She might not be able to fix the
past, but she was willing to spend a
lifetime showing him what love could
be: beautiful not ugly, uplifting not
destructive, and more precious than
diamonds.

Kitty French

#23. A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Benjamin Franklin

#24. God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#25. You can't do anything if a person says no. In such a case, there's nothing you can do - unlike the popular cliche that pressure is exerted, or that maybe an unwilling source is done away with.

Markus Wolf

#26. You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

Geraldine Brooks

#27. Mathematicians also make terrible salesmen. Physicists can discover the same thing as a mathematician and say 'We've discovered a great new law of nature. Give us a billion dollars.' And if it doesn't change the world, then they say, 'There's an even deeper thing. Give us another billion dollars.'

Gian-Carlo Rota

#28. A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#29. The lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal or a challenge, it is hard to decide which.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#30. The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#31. Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#32. THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#33. The front room of his house was what I called 'untidy chic'. Prefects weren't subject to the same Rules on room tidiness, but since no one really enjoyed clutter, a certain style of ordered untidiness was generally considered de couleur for a prefect's room.

Jasper Fforde

#34. Strict walking is much despised in these days, but rest assured, dear reader, it is both the safest and the happiest.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#35. Are mathematical ideas invented or discovered? This question has been repeatedly posed by philosophers through the ages and will probably be with us forever.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#36. We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of 'proving theorems.' Is a writer's job mainly that of 'writing sentences?

Gian-Carlo Rota

#37. I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.

Walter Isaacson

#38. Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#39. It is a common public relations gimmick to give the entire credit for the solution of famous problems to the one mathematician who is responsible for the last step.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#40. Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

Gian-Carlo Rota

#41. Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.

Gian-Carlo Rota