Gowers Quotes

#1. When focusing only on one's credentials one boasts his own incompetence in his capacity for discernment of the individual.

Criss Jami

#2. That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with 'and' is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.

Ernest Gowers

#3. Although the prime numbers are rigidly determined, they somehow feel like experimental data.

Timothy Gowers

#4. A typical mathematician does not actively try to be useful. Individual mathematicians are motivated primarily by a subtle mixture of ambition and intellectual curiosity, and not by a wish to benefit society, nevertheless, mathematics as a whole does benefit society.

Timothy Gowers

#5. Be clear, be brief, be human.

Ernest Gowers

#6. Moreover, if one selects a problem, works on it in isolation for a few years and finally solves it, there is a danger, unless the problem is very famous, that it will no longer be regarded as all that significant.

Timothy Gowers

#7. What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.

Timothy Gowers

#8. Can we have genuine knowledge of space without ever leaving our armchairs?

Timothy Gowers

#9. The only thing that ultimately matters is to eat an ice-cream cone, play a slide trombone, plant a small tree, good God, now you're free.

Ray Manzarek

#10. The atlas is a manifold. This is a typical mathematician's use of the word "is", and should not be confused with the normal use.

Timothy Gowers

#11. Of course I am not religious - I don't in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so.

Philip Warren Anderson

#12. love isn't the flourishes and fancy ironwork that decorate a facade, it's the foundation of a building. It's what forever is built on.

Bette Lee Crosby

#13. Cath wished she didn't use the word "just" so much. It was her passive-aggressive tell, like someone who twitched when they were lying.

Rainbow Rowell

#14. This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

Timothy Gowers

#15. Here is something Category-Theorists like: it is trivial, but not trivially trivial.

Timothy Gowers

#16. I was an overnight success all right, but 30 years is a long, long night.

Ray Kroc

#17. Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

Henry Adams

#18. Everything that is fear cannot be love, and everything that is love cannot be fear.

Wayne Dyer

#19. It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers.

Timothy Gowers