I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

The Besicovitch style is architectural. He builds out of simply elements a delicate and complicated architectural structure, usually with a hierarchical plan, and then, when the building is finished, the completed structure leads by simple arguments to an unexpected conclusion. Every Besicovitch proof is a work of art, as carefully constructed as a Bach fugue.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.