He preferred smart questions to smart answers.
Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn't afraid to say 'we don't know.' For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn't have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It ...
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the origina...
Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s ...
Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.
...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pat...
I was impressed by the delicate weaving of the numbers. No matter how carefully you unraveled a thread, a single moment of inattention could leave you stranded, with no clue what to do next. In all his years of study, the Professor had managed to gli...
It was clear that he didn't remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.
Because he had been- and in many ways still was- such a brilliant man, he no doubt understood the nature of his memory problem. It wasn't pride that prevented him from asking for help but a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for tho...
