"She just explained to me that this was the way the world was, and we had to accept it, and there was nothing we can do about it, and we had to just sit there and adjust to it."

"I remember that the advanced calculus course was taught by a graduate student and met at 7 A.M. every morning, and not only was I the only woman, I was the only black in the class. I sat right next to the door and I was truly isolated. I had no one to talk to in the class; even though there were two other girls in the class, they avoided me like I was some sort of plague, because if you're not a white woman, you can't associate with anybody except maybe handicapped men."

"Was my vacuum created because I was black or female or both?"

"Geometric topology was really the dominant new topological theme in the 1950's and differential topology in the 1960's. Algebraic topology did not take a back seat in either development. But something happened in the 1960's which had profound effect upon the part of topology we are concerned with. ... Paul Cohen proved that it is consistent with the usual axioms for set theory that the continuum hypothesis be false. In itself this theorem has few consequence in topology for there is very little one can do with not-CH alone. But the technique of proof, called forcing, has translations into Boolean algebra terms, into partial order terms, into terms which lead to remarkable combinatorial statements which are applicable to a wide variety of topological problems related to abstract spaces."

"Our first meeting in person took place at the IMU Congress in Nice in the summer of 1970. Together with my friend and collaborator András Hajnal we were eager to meet her, and this happened right after she arrived in Nice. Her first sentence to us was “I just proved that there is a Dowker space;” i.e., a normal space whose product with the unit interval is not normal. To appreciate the weight of this sentence, one should know that this meant she solved the most important open problem of general topology of the 1960s."

"A space has the shrinking property if, for every open cover {Va | a ∈ A}, there is an open cover {Wa | a ∈ A} with for each a ∈ A. lt is strangely difficult to find an example of a normal space without the shrinking property. It is proved here that any ∑-product of metric spaces has the shrinking property."

"Souslin's conjecture sounds simple. Anyone who understands the meaning of countable and uncountable can "work" on it. It is in fact very tricky. There are standard patterns one builds. There are standard errors in judgement one makes. And there are standard not-quite-counter-examples which almost everyone who looks at the problem happens upon. S. Tennenbaum and others have shown that that it is consistent with the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory that Souslin's conjecture be either true or false."

"The purpose of this paper is to construct (without using any set theoretic conditions beyond the axiom of choice) a normal Hausforff space X whose Cartesian product with the closed unit interval I is not normal. Such a space is often called a Dowker space. The question of the existence of such a space is an old and natural one ..."

"It is a lucky thing that newspaper reporters do not attend these meetings. If they did, they would see how little our activities are related to the real needs of society."