Math with Bad Drawings

Creativity is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.

Reality is a lovely starting point, but the coolest destinations lie far beyond it.

It is a funny paradox of design: utility breeds beauty. There is elegance in efficiency, a visual pleasure in things that just barely work.

To do good work, you’ve first got to engage with nitty-gritty details. Then, to do great work, you’ve got to move beyond them.

Psychological insurance can quickly turn predatory. When we buy protection against fear itself, we invite companies to make us afraid.

Hello! You are a Mission: Impossible agent. You dangle from ceilings into locked vaults, cling via suction cup to skyscrapers, and unmask your true identity to the double-crossers you’ve just triple-crossed. Also, you do not seem to get what “impossible” means. “Impossible” does not mean “as routine as a quarterly earnings report.” Nor does it mean “very rare” or “rather difficult” or “whew, it’s a good thing that knife blade halted a millimeter from Tom Cruise’s eye.” It means “not possible.” And yet it keeps happening. Your film’s title is as dishonest as its theme song is catchy.

Science has never been defined by infallibility or superhuman perfection. It has always been about healthy skepticism, about putting every hypothesis to the test.

There are two kinds of people in life: those who like crude dualities and those who do not.

If you ditch the rulebook, you lose the grace. Even the wacky, avant-garde, convention-defying arts—experimental film, expressionist painting, professional wrestling—draw their power from playing against the limitations of the chosen medium.

A mathematician who can’t convey his thinking will suffer the same fate that I did that day: to be a lonely island of thought, whose ideas never reach other shores, while the mathematician who can share her truth enjoys a hero’s welcome from the grateful crowd.

To your credit, it takes patience to survive all the twists and turns. But it takes a more profound patience to keep thinking afterward.

even if I could translate into plain English, it wouldn’t make sense to someone unfamiliar with Fourier analysis, any more than Twilight would make sense to someone unfamiliar with teenage hormones.

Most mathematics is less about solving someone else’s riddles than about devising your own, exploring which constraints produce interesting games and which produce drab ones. Eventually, this process of rule tweaking, of moving from game to game, comes to feel like a grand never-ending game in itself.

Here’s a tough-love life lesson: just because you set your mind to something doesn’t mean you can do it. Say you’re creating a square, and you want its diagonal to be the same length as its sides. Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how squares work.

Creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination,” said Andrew Lang.