Very little mathematics has direct applications - though fortunately most of it has plenty of indirect ones.

A technique is a trick that works.

God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

Very little mathematics has direct applications - though fortunately most of it has plenty of indirect ones.

A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

THE COMPUTER IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT for doing faster what we already know how to do slower. All pretensions to computer intelligence and paradise-tomorrow promises should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust. And if that should happen, our civilization might not survive.

Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.