John von Neumann

“I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics,”

“You should call it entropy , for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name , so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. Suggesting to Claude Shannon a name for his new uncertainty function, as quoted in Scientific American Vol. 225 No. 3, (1971), p. 180.”

“John von Neumann (1903”

“When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system. As quoted in John von Neumann, 1903”

“It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way… Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe. As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman”

“Method in the Physical Sciences”

“The Role of Mathematics in the Sciences and in Society”

“Unsolved Problems in Mathematics”

“Can we survive Technology?”

“inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical; when it shows signs of becoming baroque, then the danger signal is up. It would be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the baroque and the very high baroque... Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.”