Miscellaneous

Some useful links:


Math. literature search engines:


Research journals of interest:


Other magazines & journals of interest:


Articles about academic publishing and manipulation of journal's "impact" factor:

Interesting quotes:

  • Everything that can be said, can be said clearly. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

  • Any good idea can be stated in fifty words or less. (Stan Ulam)

  • Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. (Albert Einstein)

  • Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. (Alfred Whitehead)

  • The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics - and they are mostly clever fools - seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way. (Silvanus P. Thompson)

  • Euler lacked only one thing to make him a perfect genius: He failed to be incomprehensible! (Ferdinand Georg Frobenius); watch this beautiful talk by William Dunham.

  • If Euler were alive today, he wouldn't be proving existence theorems. (Nick Trefethen, The definition of numerical analysis)

  • It's hard to find the roots of polynomials; much harder than proving that they exist. (David Eisenbud)

  • Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. (Godfrey Hardy)

  • The crux of good mathematics is to find problems that are well motivated and important and somehow centrally connected to lots of other mathematics. (Alex Wright)

  • Seek simplicity, and distrust it. (Alfred Whitehead)

  • Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. (Alfred Whitehead)

  • Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything learned in school. (Albert Einstein)

  • Knowing you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't. (Ray Dalio)

  • The search for truth is more precious than its possession. (Albert Einstein)

  • Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis? (Paul Halmos)

  • A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one. (Paul Halmos)

  • You keep on learning and learning, and pretty soon you learn something no one has learned before. (Richard Feynman)

  • To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. (Richard Feynman)

  • It is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain. (Albert Einstein)

  • The advancement and perfection of mathematics are intimately connected with the prosperity of the state. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

  • It appears to me that if one wishes to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils. (Niels Abel)

  • Knowing what is big and what is small is more important than being able to solve partial differential equations. (Stan Ulam)

  • The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain. (Jacques Hadamard)

  • Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore. (Albert Einstein)

  • Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater. (Albert Einstein)

  • An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. (Werner Heisenberg)

  • An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. (Niels Bohr)

  • A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. (Doug Linder)

  • Unless you have courage, a courage that keeps you going, always going, no matter what happens, there is no certainty of success. It is really an endurance race. (Henry Ford)

  • The people who succeed the most are the people who have failed the most, because they are people who have tried the most. (Anonymous)

  • A minute's success pays the failure of years. (Robert Browning)

  • If A is success in life, then A = x + y + z. Work is x, play is y and z is keeping your mouth shut. (Albert Einstein)

  • A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower. (John Ousterhout)

  • No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. (Andy Hunt)

  • Deleted code is debugged code. (Jeff Sickel)

  • The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed. (Henry Ford)

  • Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it. (Niels Bohr)

  • I can. I will. End of story. (Anonymous)

  • The purpose of life is to prove and to conjecture. (Paul Erdős)

  • There are ... 10080 minutes in the week. (Silvanus P. Thompson)

  • There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave. (Paul Erdős)

  • If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven? (David Hilbert)

  • The world needs heroes and it's better they be harmless men like me than villains like Hitler. (Albert Einstein)

  • If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew. (Albert Einstein)

  • The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed. (Alfred Whitehead)

  • Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. (Albert Einstein)

  • The faculty is not a pool changing room. (David Hilbert, On the proposed appointment of Emmy Noether as the first woman professor.)

  • Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education. (Paul Erdős)

  • Happiness is pretty simple: someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to. (Rita Mae Brown)