There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of mathematical creativity. One, akin to conquering a mountain peak, consists of solving a problem which has r… - Mark Kac

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.

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.

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.