Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

From Wikiquote: Reply, according to Dr. Felix T. Smith of Stanford Research Institute, to a physicist friend who had said “I’m afraid I don’t understand the method of characteristics,” as quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979) by Gary Zukav, Bantam Books, p. 208, footnote.

citation

John von Neumann. (2023, November 22). Wikiquote. Retrieved January 15, 2024 from https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=John_von_Neumann&oldid=3405065.

mathematics of

John von Neumann

random

In the Antarctic, Adélie penguins harbor consistent levels of the pesticide DDT even though it’s been widely banned since the 1970s. The source: glacier meltwater that trickles past the penguins on its way to the sea, eventually making its way into the penguins’ food webs.

John von Neumann (Wikipedia) John “Johnny” von Neumann (/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos, pronounced [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to be “the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both pure and applied mathematics”. He integrated pure and applied sciences.