The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Making mathematics accessible to the educated layman, while keeping high scientific standards, has always been considered a treacherous navigation between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public misunderstanding.

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

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

Why is it that Serge Lange's Linear Algebra, published by no less a Verlag than Springer, ostentatiously displays the sale of a few thousand copies over a period of fifteen years, while the same title by Seymour Lipschutz in the The Schaum's Outlines will be considered a failure unless it brings in a steady annual income from the sale of a few hundred thousand copies in twenty-six languages?

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.

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