Claude Shannon Quotes

When something is beautiful in math, everything is just perfectly lined up, and you see through sheer thought that something really beautiful can take place.

What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?

It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

There's a beauty to math. Math is so simple. It's just one step after the next.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Often in life, the most important question we can ask ourselves is: do we really have the problem we think we have?

You cannot solve a problem unless you diagnose the problem.

If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don't have a very interesting problem.

Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.

In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

It is interesting to note that life never leaves us stranded. If life hands us a problem, it hands us also the abilities with which to meet the problem.

I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.