Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”
― Alan Kay

“The popular image of the lone (and possibly slight mad) genius-who ignores the literature and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration (enhanced, perhaps, with a liberal dash of suffering) to come up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts-is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics. We do have spectacular, deep and remarkable results and insights in this subject, of course, but they are the hard-won and cumulative achievement of years, decades, or even centuries of steady work and progress of many good and great mathematicians; the advance from one stage of understanding to the next can be highly non-trivial, and sometimes rather unexpected, but still builds upon the foundation of earlier work rather than starting totally anew....Actually, I find the reality of mathematical research today-in which progress is obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck-to be far more satisfying than the romantic image that I had as a student of mathematics being advanced primarily by the mystic inspirations of some rare breed of "geniuses.”
― Terry Tao

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”
― Leslie Lamport

“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”
― John von Neumann

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
― Alan Kay

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
― Albert Einstein

“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small”
― Henry Kissinger

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol