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”
