Paul Richard Halmos foi um matemático estadunidense nascido na Hungria.
Pesquisou os campos de teoria de logaritmos, teoria das probabilidades, estatística, Teoria dos operadores e análise funcional , entre outros.
Sua autobiografia, publicada em 1987, intitula-se I Want to Be a Mathematician.
Em um artigo na revista American Scientist , Halmos defende a matemática como sendo uma arte criativa, e os matemáticos como artistas, não devoradores de números.
Wikipedia
“A biblioteca é o laboratório do matemático.”
The library is the mathematician's laboratory.
citado em "Handbook of writing for the mathematical sciences" - Página 209, Nicholas J. Higham - SIAM, 1998, ISBN 0898714206, 9780898714203 - 302 páginas
“A informática é importante, mas não para as matemáticas.”
The computer is important, but not to mathematics.
entrevista a Donald J. Albers, conforme citado em "Paul Halmos celebrating 50 years of mathematics" - Página 3, Paul Richard Halmos, John H. Ewing, Frederick W. Gehring - Springer, 1991, ISBN 0387975098, 9780387975092 - 320 páginas
“O coração da matemática são seus próprios problemas.”
problems are the heart of mathematics
Selecta: expository writing - Página 214, Paul Richard Halmos, Donald Sarason, Leonard Gillman - Springer-Verlag, 1983, ISBN 0387907564, 9780387907567 - 304 páginas
A good stock of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one.
citado em "Mathematically speaking: a dictionary of quotations" - Página 68, Alma E. Cavazos-Gaither - CRC Press, 1998, ISBN 0750305037, 9780750305037 - 484 páginas
Applied mathematics will always need pure mathematics just as anteaters will always need ants
citado em "Automated reasoning with analytic tableaux and related methods ..." - Página 22, Bernhard Beckert - Birkhäuser, 2005, ISBN 3540289313, 9783540289319 - 342 páginas
Extraído de "I want to be a Mathematician".
“What does it take to be [a mathematician]?”
Fonte: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
Contexto: What does it take to be [a mathematician]? I think I know the answer: you have to be born right, you must continually strive to become perfect, you must love mathematics more than anything else, you must work at it hard and without stop, and you must never give up.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
Contexto: Mathematics is not a deductive science — that's a cliché. 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. You want to find out what the facts are, and what you do is in that respect similar to what a laboratory technician does. Possibly philosophers would look on us mathematicians the same way as we look on the technicians, if they dared.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces.”
Proposal for a humorous first sentence to a review of a mathematical paper, rejected by editors.
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“I was too near it then to see how shallow it all was...”
Fonte: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“It takes a long time to learn to live — by the time you learn your time is gone.”
Fonte: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“I like words more than numbers, and I always did.”
Fonte: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)