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



It is pretty unclear to me which of these are wise and which are unwise. I will leave it up to you to decide.


  • “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”
  • “I called the orange stuff a definition, but you could also call it a lie”
  • “You take two halves of a Bart Simpson and glue them together”
  • “Integrate over the boundary of Eastern Europe and you get zero”
  • “Presumably cohomology became legal”
  • “The word surely is doing a lot of work there”
  • “Imagine a Kafkaesque scenario is going on on this manifold”