Paul Halmos
From Wikiquote
Paul Halmos (March 3, 1916 — October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born Jewish American mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, functional analysis (in particular, Hilbert spaces), and mathematical logic.
.png){kind=small} |
This scientist article is a stub. You can help Wikiquote by expanding it. |
[edit] Sourced
- I read once that the true mark of a pro — at anything — is that he understands, loves, and is good at even the drudgery of his profession.
- The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces.
- André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters.
- He was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology — which was called "minus T" by some mathematicians ("IIT" — get it?) — and I knew him slightly
- Mathematics is not a deductive science — that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and the start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork. You want to find out what the facts are, and what you do is in that respect similar to what a laboratory technician does. Possibly philosophers would look on us mathematicians the same way as we look on the technicians, if they dared.
- Paul Halmos (1985). I want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-96470-3. OCLC 230812318.
