I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.
You want to get to the top of the cliff. But that's not what you focus on immediately. You focus on the next ledge just beyond your reach, because you need to do one clever thing to get up there. And then, once you get there, you do it again. A lot of this is rather boring and not very glamorous. But you can't jump cliffs in a single bound.
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.
If I don't understand something properly, every single component, it really bugs me.
Research sometimes feels like an ongoing TV series in which some amazing revelations have already been made, but there are still plenty of cliff-hangers and unresolved plotlines that you want to see resolved. But unlike TV, we have to do the work ourselves to figure out what happens next.
If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.
There might be a hidden structure in pi that we simply haven't discovered.
I enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would.
When I was seven or eight, whenever I was getting too rowdy at night, my parents would give me a maths workbook to work on to quieten me down.
Math research is more like a marathon.
If there is something that I should know how to do but don't, it bugs me. I feel like I have to sit down and work out exactly what the problem is.
Most of what I do does not save lives.
For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others.
It was traditional to not actually cash the prizes that Erdos did award while he was alive. People usually framed the cheque instead.
I think one nice thing about mathematics is that we don't really have one prize that dominates all the others, like the Nobel prizes.
The standard high school curriculum traditionally has been focused towards physics and engineering. So calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra have always been the most emphasized, and for good reason - these are very important.
The accuracy of Wikipedia can be dodgy in some places, but in maths, it's really quite good.
I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.
Talent is important, but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
