Quotes from Steven Strogatz

You can get a certain amount of pleasure as a mathematical spectator, reading and watching some of the most beautiful arguments that have been created in the history of humanity. But that's too passive.

When you love a problem, its contours, obstacles and resistances are all just part of its character.

When you create something new, you're breaking tradition - which is an act of defiance.

Yet in another way, calculus is fundamentally naive, almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with calculus I can predict the future -- or better yet, reconstruct the past. I wish I could do that now.

In mathematical modeling, as in all of science, we always have to make choices about what to stress and what to ignore. The art of abstraction lies in knowing what is essential and what is minutia, what is signal and what is noise, what is trend and what is wiggle. It's an art because such choices always involve an element of danger; they come close to wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty.

nothing cements a friendship like hating the same person.

...nothing cements a friendship like hating the same person.

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.