Quotes About Edensor

#1. Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

John Edensor Littlewood

#2. The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

John Edensor Littlewood

#3. Today more than ever we need creative minds to address the issues of the age. And one of the most urgent is this: How can humanity know so much, achieve so much, and still fail so many people so badly?

Abdallah II Of Jordan

#4. Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.

Ramona Ausubel

#5. I don't want a life without my mom in it, but I'm not someone who curls up in the fetal position and says, 'Mommy, take care of me!' I don't like people catering to me. It feels so awkward and uncomfortable.

Khloe Kardashian

#6. It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse chance was 1:10. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad, and then this particular event would be quite likely.

John Edensor Littlewood

#7. ... in a snap the world can fall down around you and leave you, for years and years, trying to get back to a place where once upon a time you were happy.

Lee Martin

#8. I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.

Floyd Abrams

#9. The referee said it was not acceptable, but the Press considered they could not refuse to publish a book by a professor of the university.

John Edensor Littlewood

#10. The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

John Edensor Littlewood

#11. A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

John Edensor Littlewood

#12. My view is quite simple. When your dog pees on the carpet, you do not give away your dog. You say, This dog is special. I have to teach him not to pee on the carpet. I feel exactly the same way about men. They need to be taught things.

Jacqueline Bisset

#13. I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

John Edensor Littlewood

#14. For a woman who can handle herself so well in a fight, I can't believe you got taken out by a defenseless doorjamb. (Ravyn)
Given the size of my goose egg, I would argue the defenseless part. That doorjamb has a mean left hook.(Susan)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#15. The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

John Edensor Littlewood

#16. Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency of artifacts, space and non-humans from the past.

Tim Edensor

#17. A heavy warning used to be given that pictures are not rigorous; this has never had its bluff called and has permanently frightened its victims into playing for safety.

John Edensor Littlewood

#18. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

John Edensor Littlewood

#19. I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now.

John Edensor Littlewood

#20. It is possible for a mathematician to be "too strong" for a given occasion. He forces through, where another might be driven to a different, and possible more fruitful, approach. (So a rock climber might force a dreadful crack, instead of finding a subtle and delicate route.)

John Edensor Littlewood

#21. A Miscellany is a collection without a natual ordering relation.

John Edensor Littlewood

#22. Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

John Edensor Littlewood

#23. I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.

John Edensor Littlewood

#24. The first lecture of each new year renews for most people a light stage fright.

John Edensor Littlewood

#25. Our policy is to concentrate holdings. We try to avoid buying a little of this or that when we are only lukewarm about the business or its price. When we are convinced as to attractiveness, we believe in buying worthwhile amounts.

Warren Buffett

#26. Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power.

Henry Hallett Dale

#27. Victory tastes sweetest in the absence of haunting memories, Bult. Savor it.

Steven Erikson

#28. A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

John Edensor Littlewood

#29. The higher mental activities are pretty tough and resilient, but it is a devastating experience if the drive does stop. Some people lose it in their forties and can only stop. In England they are a source of Vice-Chancellors.

John Edensor Littlewood

#30. I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said ... "

John Edensor Littlewood

#31. In passing, I firmly believe that research should be offset by a certain amount of teaching, if only as a change from the agony of research. The trouble, however, I freely admit, is that in practice you get either no teaching, or else far too much.

John Edensor Littlewood

#32. Being a lady does not require silence.

Betty Ford