Vikram Seth Quotes

I'm just a big homebody and love word games like Scrabble and Boggle.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

I'd like to go away for six months and learn to kiteboard and windsurf. I love pinochle, I love chess and I love windsurfing.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

It's strange how few of the world's great problems are solved by people who remember their algebra.

I love yoga. I can practice it wherever I am, at home, in my hotel room... I like playing tennis, too, but that's more of a hobby because I'm not very good!

I didn't know what kinds of questions to ask in mathematics. In physics, I could see there were things that were known and things that weren't.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.

The broader the chess player you are, the easier it is to be competitive, and the same seems to be true of mathematics - if you can find links between different branches of mathematics, it can help you resolve problems. In both mathematics and chess, you study existing theory and use that to go forward.

When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They're all creative expressions.

My dad is a mathematician; I think we both have that problem-solving, looking-for-patterns way of thinking.

Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.

I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess; they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had.

Massages and swimming are feel-good activities which are both mentally and physically relaxing.