Academics From Hungary

"I do what I have to do, although I don’t know why I have to."

"At any rate I found myself writing because I had to write, although I didn’t know why."

"For me this is a fact, writing is necessity, I don’t know why, but it seems it was the only solution offered to me, even if it doesn’t solve anything; still it doesn't leave me…"

"If you’re a revolutionary, you shouldn’t have started a family."

"What we usually mean by fate is what we least understand, that is to say, ourselves, that subversive, unknown individual constantly plotting against us, whom , estranged and alienated but still bowing with disgust before his might, we call, for the of simplicity, fate."

"Kertész has his eyes on the 20th century's varied efforts toward the liquidation of anything recognizable as human personality. "We are living in an age of disaster; each of us is a carrier of the disease," B. decrees in one of many flashbacks. "Disaster man has no fate, no qualities, no character." … Fatelessness is an eerie and painful novel, shocking not for its by-now familiar subject matter, but for the tone of earnest goodwill with which the young narrator attempts to understand his situation. (In one passage he discovers fleas feasting on his open wounds and, despite his horror, considers the insects' hunger and concludes that, "taking everything into account, I could see it their way.") In 1990's excellent Kaddish for an Unborn Child — which, sadly, completes the slim triad of Kertész's works available in English — he explains (via B.) that "one's religious duty, totally independent of the crippling religions of crippling churches, is . . . understanding the world." And with brutal intellectual rigor, Kertész does his best, refusing to let the Holocaust be sacralized as some mythical exception that stands outside of history, or as an untouchable sinkhole of meaning. The Nazi genocide is not an inexplicable catastrophe for Kertész, it's a given, the channel through which the world must be understood. … Liquidation is a profoundly melancholy book, wrestling not just with the legacy of the Holocaust, but with the decades of authoritarianism and disappointment that followed. … Liquidation is at its core a book about writing, about trying to tell stories that resist being told."

"If a person resolves to fight, he ought to know what he is fighting for. Otherwise it makes no sense. A person usually fights against a power in order to gain power himself. Or else because the power in question is threatening his life."

""You mustn’t forget about your future, Enrique." "I’m living for the present, Dad." "Ah!" he waved that aside. "The present is just temporary." ‘ I boiled up. "I know," I burst out. ‘It only has to be accepted temporarily — temporarily, but every day afresh. And every day ever more. Temporarily. Until we have lived to the end of our temporary lives, and one fine day we temporarily die."

"There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward."

"Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long."

"I took a stroll in the city. It was infernally hot. The usual evening hubbub around me. Lovers on the pavements, hurrying to cinemas and other places of amusement as if nothing had happened, nothing. Living their nonexistent lives. Or do they exit, and it’s me who doesn’t."

"I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!"

"I exist. Is this a life still? No, just vegetating. It seems that only one philosophy can succeed the philosophy of existentialism: nonexistentialism, the philosophy of nonexistent existence."

"There’s just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that’s a police revolution."

"Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot."

"Talking is not enough; words don’t clarify anything. I’ll have to hit upon something, but what?"

"A person’s true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all."

"Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on."

"That evening he talked about Leonardo and Michelangelo. It is impossible to place them in the human world, he said. It is impossible to comprehend how anything that attests to greatness has survived; it is obviously a result of innumerable chance events and of human incomprehension, he said. If people had understood the greatness of those works, they would have destroyed them long ago. Fortunately, people have lost their flair for greatness and only their flair for murder has persisted, though undoubtedly they have refined the latter, their flair for murder, to an art, almost to point of greatness, he said."

"I had gotten into the habit of sleeping late because I had started to see that this was the only sensible way I could kill time."

"But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together."

"Anyone who wants something else is Jewish."

"But there are times when being happy — just happy, nothing else — is simply vile." "Why?" Jill inquired. "Because," Enrique reasoned, "one cant be happy in a place where everybody is unhappy."

"People tell you that wishful thinking is bad. Do not believe it, this is just one of those generally accepted errors."

"Life is full of surprises: our approximate condition for the fall of a body through a resisting medium is precisely analogous to the exact condition for the flow of an electric current through a resisting wire [of an induction coil]. ... m\frac {dv}{dt} = mg - Kv This is the form most convenient for making an analogy with the "fall", i.e., flow, of an electric current. ...in order from left to right, mass m, rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt}, gravitational force mg, and velocity v. What are the electrical counterparts? ...To press the switch, to allow current to start flowing is the analogue of opening the fingers, to allow the body to start falling. The fall of the body is caused by the force mg due to gravity; the flow of the current is caused by the electromotive force or tension E due to the battery. The falling body has to overcome the frictional resistance of the air; the flowing current has to overcome the electrical resistance of the wire. Air resistance is proportional to the body's velocity v; electrical resistance is proportional to the current i. And consequently rate of change of velocity \frac {dv}{dt} corresponds to rate of change of current \frac {di}{dt}. ...The electromagnetic induction L opposes the change of current... And doesn't the inertia or mass m..? Isn't L, so to speak, an electromagnetic inertia? L\frac {di}{dt} = E - Ki"

"If we could be any mathematician in the history of the world (besides ourselves), who would we rather be? ...we narrowed the choice down to Euler and Pólya, and finally settled on George Pólya because of the sheer enjoyment of mathematics that he has conveyed by so many examples."

"Even if without the Scott's proverbial thrift, the difficulty of solving differential equations is an incentive to using them parsimoniously. Happily here is a commodity of which a little may be made to go a long way. ...the equation of small oscillations of a pendulum also holds for other vibrational phenomena. In investigating swinging pendulums we were, albeit unwittingly, also investigating vibrating tuning forks."

"Simplicity is worth buying if we do not have to pay too great a loss of precision for it."

"The differential equation of the first order \frac {dy}{dx} = f(x,y) ...prescribes the slope \frac {dy}{dx} at each point of the plane (or at each point of a certain region of the plane we call the field"). ...a differential equation of the first order... can be conceived intuitively as a problem about the steady flow of a river: Being given the direction of the flow at each point, find the streamlines. ...It leaves open the choice between the two possible directions in the line of a given slope. Thus... we should say specifically "direction of an unoriented straight line" and not merely "direction.""

"For mathematics education and the world of problem solving it marked a line of demarcation between two eras, problem solving before and after Polya."

"Facing any part of the observable reality, we are never in possession of complete knowledge, nor in a state of complete ignorance, although usually much closer to the latter state."

"We wish to see... the typical attitude of the scientist who uses mathematics to understand the world around us. ...In the solution of a problem ...there are typically three phases. The first phase is entirely or almost entirely a matter of physics; the third, a matter of mathematics; and the intermediate phase, a transition from physics to mathematics. The first phase is the formulation of the physical hypothesis or conjecture; the second, its translation into equations; the third, the solution of the equations. Each phase calls for a different kind of work and demands a different attitude."

"If we deal with our problem not knowing, or pretending not to know the general theory encompassing the concrete case before us, if we tackle the problem "with bare hands", we have a better chance to understand the scientist's attitude in general, and especially the task of the applied mathematician."

"The volume of the cone was discovered by Democritus... He did not prove it, he guessed it... not a blind guess, rather it was reasoned conjecture. As Archimedes has remarked, great credit is due to Democritus for his conjecture since this made proof much easier. Eudoxes... a pupil of Plato, subsequently gave a rigorous proof. Surely the labor or writing limited his manuscript to a few copies; none has survived. In those days editions did not run to thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies as modern books—especially, bad books—do. However, the substance of what he wrote is nevertheless available to us. ...Euclid's great achievement was the systematization of the works of his predecessors. The Elements preserve several of Eudoxes' proofs."

"Good approximations often lead to better ones."

"Mathematics succeeds in dealing with tangible reality by being conceptual. We cannot cope with the full physical complexity; we must idealize."

"If you cannot solve the proposed problem, try to solve first a simpler related problem."

"I... present also examples of historic interest, examples of real mathematical beauty, and examples illustrating the parallelism of the procedures in other sciences, or in everyday life."

"The general or amateur student should also get a taste of demonstrative reasoning... he should acquire a standard with which he can compare alleged evidence of all sorts aimed at him in modern life."

"For many of the stories told the final form resulted from a sort of informal psychological experiment. I discussed the subject with several different classes... Several passages... have been suggested by answers of my students, or... modified... by the reaction of my audience."

"The cookbook gives a detailed description of ingredients and procedures but no proofs for its prescriptions or reasons for its recipes; the proof of the pudding is in the eating. … Mathematics cannot be tested in exactly the same manner as a pudding; if all sorts of reasoning are debarred, a course of calculus may easily become an incoherent inventory of indigestible information."

"To write and speak correctly is certainly necessary; but it is not sufficient. A derivation correctly presented in the book or on the blackboard may be inaccessible and uninstructive, if the purpose of the successive steps is incomprehensible, if the reader or listener cannot understand how it was humanly possible to find such an argument...."

"Demonstrative reasoning penetrates the sciences just as far as mathematics does, but it is in itself (as mathematics is in itself) incapable of yielding essentially new knowledge about the world around us. Anything new that we learn about the world involves plausible reasoning, which is the only kind of reasoning for which we care in everyday affairs."

"We need heuristic reasoning when we construct a strict proof as we need scaffolding when we erect a building."

"The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof; but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by guessing. If the learning of mathematics reflects to any degree the invention of mathematics, it must have a place for guessing, for plausible inference."

"In plausible reasoning the principal thing is to distinguish... a more reasonable guess from a less reasonable guess."

"The efficient use of plausible reasoning is a practical skill and it is learned... by imitation and practice. ...what I can offer are only examples for imitation and opportunity for practice."

"I shall often discuss mathematical discoveries... I shall try to make up a likely story how the discovery could have happened. I shall try to emphasize the motives underlying the discovery, the plausible inferences that led to it... everything that deserves imitation."

"Why should the typical student be interested in those wretched triangles? ...He is to be brought to see that without the knowledge of triangles there is not trigonometry; that without trigonometry we put back the clock millennia to Standard Darkness Time and antedate the Greeks."

"The best of ideas is hurt by uncritical acceptance and thrives on critical examination."