A
finite
set
(with a small
cardinality)
of quotes from my math professors:
{
Quotes of Wilson, Gorodetski, Keevash:
- "When I ask you to recall something, [laughs] most of you will not have seen this before. Who was here in the nineteenth century?"
- - Wilson on the number of negative eigenvalues of a real symmetric matrix, 2005.11.01.
- "Given, well you're given or not given, suppose you are given."
- - Wilson on linear recurrences, 2005.11.14.
- This topic should remind everyone of linear differential equations... except me: as I have forgotten all about it, but someone told me it has similarities.
- - Wilson while writing the linear recurrences on the board, 2005.11.14.
- "Ya, [sadly] you are right. But can you find an independent sequence? I can."
- - Wilson responding to a challenge question, 2005.11.14.
- "I think it is 53, if it is not, change [the question] so [the answer] is right."
- - Wilson, 2005.11.14.
- "That's it, there's nothing more to say about linear recurrences. Except I made up a problem and you have to say something about it."
- - Wilson, 2005.11.14.
- "If I factor the denominator, it occurs to me that there is something called partial fractions, I heard it once, do you remember this?"
- - Wilson, 2005.11.14.
- "And it works out to oh I forget, well I don't forget, it is [writes the result on the board]."
- - Wilson, 2005.11.14.
- "There's a proof in algebra using algebraic closures. In this class, we prove existence by counting them. Oh! The number is greater than 0, they exist. They tried to fool me that I need algebraic closures so I need to know that stuff. You don't. All you need is to know about generating functions."
- - Wilson on irreducible polynomials over finite fields, 2005.11.15.
- "Compare coefficients of xn to find... I find something I don't know. Except I've seen it hundred of times, but you might have not known it. I am pretending I discovered this from that. Actually I discovered it by reading a book thirty years ago."
- - Wilson on the recurrence relation of derangements: dn=n dn-1 + (-1)n, 2005.11.21.
- "You remember Ryser? He was here at Caltech, retired in '85"
- - Wilson on Gale-Ryser Theorem, 2005.11.28.
- Proposition. Let I be an interval, then l(I)=m*(I). "Is it clear that this is unclear? This is one of the proofs that are hard to follow due to simplicity. It is not obvious what is obvious and what is not obvious."
- - Gorodetski on Lebesgue outer measure, 2006.01.18.
- "I remember when I first met this abbreviation in a homework, I was quite puzzled."
- - Gorodetski on "WLOG", 2006.02.15.
- "I am beginning to be very suspicious of this theorem [15.14]."
- - Keevash, 2006.02.16.
- "Colour is just a picturesque name, I mean give each vertex a number."
- - Keevash, 2006.02.21.
- "We did nothing, but we proved very strong statements."
- - Gorodetski on applying Hilbert space to Fourier series, 2006.02.22.
- "[P(Y > a) = P(etY > eta)] may seem a strange thing to do, but it has a nice [pause] effect in [eh...] or something."
- - Keevash, 2006.02.28.
- "To simplify notation [in Fourier theory] the constant π should be chosen to be 1."
- - Gorodetski, 2006.03.01.
- "Using the fact that it looks like whatchamacallit [pause and draws a bell-shaped curve] it goes up and then it goes down."
- - Keevash, 2006.03.02.
- "You'll need to know what the powers of a number is: [writes] 22=4, 23=8 [and keeps on writing until] 219=524268."
- - Gorodetski, 2006.03.03.
- "Before I give the proof of this theorem, which will take all of this lecture and next lecture to prove, I would like to give an application of this theorem. In number theory."
- - Gorodetski, 2006.03.06.
- "There are many proofs: Most are lengthy. The one I will give is the shortest I know. But it is quite tricky... and it look like magic."
- - Gorodetski, 2006.03.06.
}