“By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.”

—  Stanislaw Ulam

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 14, Professor Again, p. 267

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanat…" by Stanislaw Ulam?
Stanislaw Ulam photo
Stanislaw Ulam 33
Polish-American mathematician 1909–1984

Related quotes

Neamat Imam photo

“Imagine a day when this yard will be crowded with hundreds of leaders of the country. They will compete with each other, argue with each other, insult each other, throw shoes, leather bags, teacups, microphones and chairs at each other, break each other’s neck and determination, and then, at the end of the day, shamelessly compromise with each other for the sake of the party, and on the order of the leader.”

Neamat Imam book The Black Coat

The Black Coat (2013)

“Comic relief raised £8 million last year. Britain sold hundreds of millions worth of weapons last year to Africa. So next year, one country in Africa will get blown to smithereens, and the next country along will get a visit from Lenny Henry. And both will feel bitterly jealous of each other.”

Frankie Boyle (1972) Scottish comedian

Give It Up for Comic Relief

Jesse Owens photo

“To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)
Context: To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten. The first "second" is when you come out of the blocks. The next is when you look up and take your first few strides to attain gain position. By that time the race is actually about half over. The final "second" — the longest slice of time in the world for an athlete — is that last half of the race, when you really bear down and see what you're made of. It seems to take an eternity, yet is all over before you can think what's happening.

Charles Fourier photo

“An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.”

Charles Fourier (1772–1837) French utopian socialist and philosopher

Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World, J. Beecher (1986), p. 315
New Amorous World

“She was the one who was supposed to have walked with him through different lives, being born and loving and dying and being born again. They'd been born for each other, to help each other grow and blossom and discover and evolve.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 2

John Ralston Saul photo

“All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

Richard Wright photo

“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Native Son (1940)

“Ninety per cent of all the mathematics we know has been discovered (or invented), in the last hundred years… the advances made in each of some dozen directions are converging into one single discipline uniting algebra, topology and analysis.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Jimmy Carter photo

“The most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, Nobel lecture (2002)

“I’ve already given you the whole explanation of how that came about. It happened because it was going to happen. All other explanations for anything are superfluous. All other explanations for anything.”

James Blish book The Quincunx of Time

Source: The Quincunx of Time (1973), Chapter 8, “The Courtship of Posi and Nega” (p. 89)

Related topics