Mark Kac

"I then reached for a time honored tactic used by mathematicians: if you can't solve the real problem, change it into one you can solve."

"Unrestricted abstraction tends to divert attention from whole areas of application whose very discovery depends of the features that the abstract point of view rules out as being accidental."

"There was hardly a page in Markov's book which did not feature the normal law and it cast a spell over me from which I have never fully recovered. Adding to the fascination was the impression that som…"

"As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as l…"

"When one is young, and seventeen is very young, one lives in the present. The future, even the near future, is cloaked in unreality."

"I had a phenomenal memory and could recite long poems by Russian poets, mainly Pushkin. Except for an unusual memory, I was not precocious in any respect and somewhat later, to the chagrin of my fathe…"

"Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is …"

"I prefer concrete things and I don't like to learn more about abstract stuff than I absolutely have to."