The Key To Having An Interesting Life

If You're In The Business World, That's What's Expected: You Should Go Bust And Then Start Again On Something Else. So It's A Much More Relaxed Kind Of A Culture. It's Also Competitive, But Not In Such A Vicious Way. I Think The Academic World Is Actually Much More Destructive Of Young People.

The Ground Of Science Was Littered With The Corpses Of Dead Unified Theories.

I Think The Biggest Misconception About Mathematics Is That Everybody Has To Learn It. That Seems To Be A Complete Mistake. All The Time Worrying About Pushing The Children And Getting Them To Be Mathematically Literate And All That Stuff. It's Terribly Hard On The Kids. It's Also Hard On The Teachers. And I Think It's Totally Useless. To Me, Mathematics Is Like Playing The Violin. Some People Can Do It - Others Can't. If You Don't Have It, Then There's No Point In Pretending.

The Purpose Of Thinking About The Future Is Not To Predict It But To Raise People's Hopes.

Mathematics Is Really An Art, Not A Science. You Could Say Science Also Is An Art. So I Would Say The Difference Is Something You Can't Really Describe - You Can Only Recognize. You Hear Somebody Playing The Violin, And It Was Fritz Kreisler Or It Was Somebody Else, And You Can Tell The Difference. It Is So In Almost Every Art. We Just Don't Understand Why It Is That There Are Just A Few People Who Are Just Completely Off The Scale And The Rest Of Them Are Just Mediocre. And We Don't Know Why. But I Say It's Certainly True Of Mathematics.