Steven G. Krantz quotes

Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.
-- Steven G. Krantz

#Math #Black #Despair

A mathematician experiments, amasses information, makes a conjecture, finds out that it does not work, gets confused and then tries to recover. A good mathematician eventually does so - and proves a theorem.
-- Steven G. Krantz

#Confused #Science #Trying

This book reminds me of James Gleick's Chaos. The ideas and stories in Loving and Hating Mathematics are timely, interesting, and sometimes even profound. The authors, writing for nonspecialists, take pains to explain technical ideas in nontechnical language, and the book should interest general readers as well as a large mathematical audience.
-- Steven G. Krantz

#Pain #Hate #Book

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

Mainstream medias representation, or its guerrilla decontextualization, of black mens lives in particular can set the stage for erroneous assumptions capable of damaging an individual or a nation.

The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer’s task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them.

Black smoke, the flickering sister of fire.

The only difference is now more young black men are in the spotlight.

When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.

I know what happiness and what despair are, and I never make a jest of such feelings. Take it, then, but in exchange —

A calm despair, without angry convulsions or reproaches directed at heaven, is the essence of wisdom.