Atle Selberg quotes

Atle Selberg quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right”
-- Atle Selberg

#Ideas Quotes #Way Quotes #Ends Quotes
“A felicitous but unproved conjecture may be of much more consequence for mathematics than the proof of many a respectable theorem.”
-- Atle Selberg

#May Quotes #Mathematics Quotes #Proof Quotes

“I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.”
“Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.”
“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”
“Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.”

Source : "Cartographer of Word Galaxies". Interview with Susan Lerner, logger.believermag.com. September 24, 2013.
“I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way.”
“It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.”
“It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.”
“You see, Hansel and Gretel donâ€™t just show up at the end of this story. They show up. And then they get their heads cut off. Just thought youâ€™d like to know.”

Source : Adam Gidwitz (2012). “In a Glass Grimmly”, p.143, Penguin
“Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.”
“Best of an island is once you get there - you can't go any farther...you've come to the end of things...”

You may also like:

Andre Weil
Mathematician
Andrew Wiles
Mathematician
Archimedes
Mathematician
Bernhard Riemann
Mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Mathematician
Enrico Bombieri
Mathematician
Esther Dyson
Journalist
Freeman Dyson
Physicist
G. H. Hardy
Mathematician
Jean Dieudonne
Mathematician
Leonhard Euler
Mathematician
Murray Gell-Mann
Physicist
Paul Erdos
Mathematician
Pythagoras
Philosopher
Richard P. Feynman
Physicist
Simone Weil
Philosopher
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Mathematician
Steven Weinberg
Theoretical Physicist
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Peter Sarnak
Mathematician