4 Quotes & Sayings By Paul R Halmos

Paul R. Halmos was born in Illinois and graduated from Illinois State University in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He went on to receive his PhD in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1974. He then joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and later moved to the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz Read more

In 1997, he retired from UCSC and became a research fellow at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Since 2001, Halmos has been a Research Fellow with the Center for Research on Learning and Instruction (CRI) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

1
The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. . Paul R. Halmos
2
[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing–one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing.. They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me. Paul R. Halmos
3
Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork. Paul R. Halmos