
“We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”
Source: Stay
"Mathematical Games", in Scientific American (October 1973); also quoted in Roger B. Nelson, Proofs Without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking (1993), "Introduction", p. v
“We can get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”
Source: Stay
11 August 1972; pp. 90-91
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)
“I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem which this margin is too small to contain.”
Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.
Note written on the margins of his copy of Claude-Gaspar Bachet's translation of the famous Arithmetica of Diophantus, this was taken as an indication of what became known as Fermat's last theorem, a correct proof for which would be found only 357 years later; as quoted in Number Theory in Science and Communication (1997) by Manfred Robert Schroeder