top of page

"I was fortunate to find an extraordinary mathematics and applied mathematics program in Toronto."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Mathematics quotes

"Mathematics doesn't care about those beyond the numbers."

""Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics."

"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."

"The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself."

"He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus."

"I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way."

"I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about."

"Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics."

"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
Explore more quotes by Walter Kohn


"I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view."


"On another level, I want to mention that I have a strong Jewish identity and - over the years - have been involved in several Jewish projects, such as the establishment of a strong program of Judaic Studies at the University of California in San Diego."


"I have just joined the Board of the Population Institute because I am convinced that early stabilization of the world's population is important for the attainment of this objective."


"During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes."


"My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist."


"Originally I had planned to revert to nuclear physics there, in particular the structure of the deuteron."


"My project was radiation damage of Si and Ge by energetic electrons, critical for the use of the recently developed semiconductor devices for applications in outer space."


"However, while the Nazi barbarians and their collaborators threatened the entire world, I could not accept his philosophy and, after several earlier attempts, was finally accepted into the Canadian Infantry Corps during the last year of World War II."


"In particular, I established a reasonably accurate energy threshold for permanent displacement of a nucleus from its regular lattice position, substantially smaller than had been previously presumed."
bottom of page