If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage.
The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.
It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.
There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.
Typing is no substitute for thinking.
The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.
In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are responsible for what you believe.
What are the important problems of your field?
Luck favors the prepared mind.
If the prior distribution, at which I am frankly guessing, has little or no effect on the result, then why bother; and if it has a large effect, then since I do not know what I am doing how would I dare act on the conclusions drawn?
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.
True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it’s spelled with a lower case letter.
It may be said “In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn’t be doing it.” In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.
Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible information about physical processes.
One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.
Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.
Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.
Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.
Computer scientists stand on each other’s feet.