“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.”

— John Von Neumann

Reply, according to Dr. Felix T. Smith of Stanford Research Institute, to a physicist friend who had said "I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics," as quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979) by Gary Zukav, Bantam Books, p. 208, footnote.

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John Von Neumann 19

Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath 1903–1957

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