Marcus du Sautoy Quotes

Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Complex things, if you don't understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

If you can't summarize an issue on one page, you don't understand the issue well enough.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

One good analogy is worth three hours discussion.

The one thing I seek above all else is understanding. Sometimes I'm so frustrated and I don't get it. But I'm lucky to have a good management team and people around me who explain things and answer my questions.

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.

Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of its causes the least to take on the magnitude.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

If I knew the answer to that question, I would disclose it.

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.

Transparency doesn't mean much if the consumer doesn't understand what they're looking at.

Understanding is the solution to every problem.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

Sometimes it's easier to understand things than it is to figure them out

They understand but a little who understand only what can be explained.