Quotes About Landau

The Gestapo officer in charge of the Jewish labor force, Felix Landau, decided that Bruno was no ordinary Jew, but a necessary one. Think on the term for a moment. What is a necessary human?

It turned out that those years I was at the Studio were the last years that Mr. Landau was alive and teaching. They were also the last years of some of the greatest teachers that have walked the earth. I got to hear the advice of Charlie Laughton, Mark Rydell, and Penny Allen.

I was very thin, exceedingly thin. If you look at 'North By Northwest,' you'll get a clue.

Ruelle had heard talks by Steve Smale about the horseshoe map and the chaotic possibilities of dynamical systems. He had also thought about fluid turbulence and the classic Landau picture. He suspected that these ideas were related—and contradictory.

The equations of fluid flow are nonlinear partial differential equations, unsolvable except in special cases. Yet Ruelle worked out an abstract alternative to Landau's picture, couched in the language of Smale, with images of space as a pliable material to be squeezed, stretched, and folded into shapes like horseshoes.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.