The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

I'm obsessively detail-oriented.

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

...methods are more important than facts. The educational value of a problem given to a student depends mostly on how often the thought processes that are invoked to solve it will be helpful in later situations. It has little to do with how useful the answer to the problem may be. On the other hand, a good problem must also motivate the students; they should be interested in seeing the answer. Since students differ so greatly, I cannot expect everyone to like the problems that please me.

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.