Stanislaw Ulam - Quotations By Ulam

Quotations By Ulam

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.

It seems to me that the impact and role of the electronic computer will significantly affect pure mathematics.

Computers are a marvelous tool, and there is no reason to fear them.

I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate...

In a lecture at Rockefeller University (1983), before a group of biologists Ulam put forth the parody:

Ask not what mathematics can do for you; ask what you can do for mathematics.

In an interview of Ulam and Mark Kac by Mitchell Feigenbaum:

When somebody mentions the word pressure to me, I sort of see something, some kind of confined hot or turbulent material.

Kac immediately said: "I cringe."

Ulam's answer to a question by Senator John O. Pastore at a congressional committee hearing, "Outer Space Propulsion by Nuclear Energy", on January 22, 1958:

Anyway, the future as a whole of mankind is to some extent involved inexorably now with going outside the globe.

Ulam was among the first to refer to the technological singularity, and possibly the originator of the metaphor itself. In May 1958, while referring to a conversation with John von Neumann:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.