Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception. Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Motivation #Math #Ideas
But anything that can be called "rigor" is lost exactly where the things become interesting and non trivial.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Science #Interesting #Mathematics
Understanding what and why did not work may be more instructive than celebrating our successes.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Science #Understanding #May
But 'the physical level of rigor' is higher on certainty than the logical one, since reproducible experiments are more reliable than anybody's, be it Hilbert's, Einstein's or GÃ¶del's intuition.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Science #Intuition #Levels
There is no significant difference between human activities and those by amoebas and even bacteria, well, on the GRAND SCALE.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Science #Differences #Bacteria
A mathematician would hardly call a correspondence between the set of 64 triples of four units and a set of twenty other units, "universal", while such correspondence is, probably, the most fundamental general feature of life on Earth.
-- Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

#Science #Twenties #Fundamentals

The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, 'My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die.' This is how we came to own these United States. This is the legacy of manifest destiny.
Let us strive on to finish the work we are in.
Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.
I don't play games. I ran away from home because my Dad brought me an Xbox.
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.
Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov famous quotes

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