There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, but the gamble was taken and very shortly afterwards, I had this extraordinary fortune of stopping at Harvard to do a lecture and learning about the price variation in just the right way.