The lack of real contact between mathematics and biology is either a tragedy, a scandal or a challenge, it is hard to decide which.

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

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.

Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

It is a common public relations gimmick to give the entire credit for the solution of famous problems to the one mathematician who is responsible for the last step.

The advice we give others is the advice that we ourselves need.

Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist.