A list of potentially wise and potentially unwise things math professors have said to me

• “I’ll let you go after doing some philosophy”
• “If you are struggling with combinatorics below the IMO level, you are just lazy”
• “Bayes rule is like Pluto, you don’t need to point it out”
• “We know what statistics is, it’s that awful discipline being done in this building”
• “Things don’t become true since they’re attractive”
• “In this class we usually don’t want to say false things”
• “I’ve been sitting here looking at the physics building, I should probably make a comment”
• “Don’t give it your all, give it an approximation of your all”
• “I had a professor who was a great mathematician but a weird guy … Kind of the same thing …”
• “If you solve a problem so successfully that no one talks about it anymore was it really a success?”
• “You will be able to prove it”