Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-Jewish-born American mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis . He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor.
“What does it take to be [a mathematician]?”
Source: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
Context: What does it take to be [a mathematician]? I think I know the answer: you have to be born right, you must continually strive to become perfect, you must love mathematics more than anything else, you must work at it hard and without stop, and you must never give up.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
Context: 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 then 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.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces.”
Proposal for a humorous first sentence to a review of a mathematical paper, rejected by editors.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“I was too near it then to see how shallow it all was...”
Source: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“It takes a long time to learn to live — by the time you learn your time is gone.”
Source: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“I like words more than numbers, and I always did.”
Source: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
