Mark Kac Quotes

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 somehow the normal law was the key to mysterious and elusive world of chance phenomena.

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

As an introduction to America, my ten months in Baltimore were superb. I find it difficult to find words to convey the feeling of decompression, of freedom, of being caught in a sweep of unimagined and unimaginable grandeur. It was a life on a different scale with more of everything - more air to breathe, more things to see, more people to know.

Independence is the central concept of probability theory and few would believe today that understanding what it meant was ever a problem.

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.

Mathematics is an ancient discipline. For as long as we can reliably reach into the past, we find its development intimately connected with the development of the whole of our civilization. For as long as we have a record of man's curiosity and his quest for understanding, we find mathematics cultivated and cherished, practiced and taught. Throughout the ages it has stood as an ultimate in rational thought and as a monument to man's desire to probe the workings of his own mind.

There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of mathematical creativity. One, akin to conquering a mountain peak, consists of solving a problem which has remained unsolved for a long time and has commanded the attention of many mathematicians. The other is exploring new territory.

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

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 in this world that the creative acts take place.

Actually, my solution generated considerable further work and the "dog-flea" model keeps cropping up from time to time in unexpected contexts.

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 likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.

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.

Where there is independence there must be the normal law.

I didn't even try to penetrate the comics, though many years later I came, somewhat grudgingly, to admire Pogo.

There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians... Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.