Writings

As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me.

Ancient lore, likely untrue, has it that the last time the meeting took place in Vegas – back in in 1986 – physicists were so stingy with money and so single-minded about science that they avoided gambling, with the result that the Vegas casinos had their worst weekend in history.

“How do you write a biography of a man who lived like a demigod? A man for whom the vocabulary and syntax of the English language was so inadequate that he had to invent words, including “synergy,” “ephemeralization,” and “livingry” (a spiritual antithesis to weaponry, which, of course, leads to “killingry”), to articulate his ideas. A man who wore three wristwatches set to three different time zones to organize his day and who angrily banged his fists if you dared ask him for his address (“Young man, I live on Planet Earth!”). A man who believed that it fell to him to save the planet....

“What problems are best solved with quantum devices?”

“When the great Patrick Modiano says he is writing a detective story, rest assured it won’t be a Sherlock-esque exhibition of armchair deductions or Poirot-like psychoanalysis of a criminal. Most likely, there won’t even be a crime.”

“When you pick up a book from the late nineteenth century, you might prepare yourself to read a musty language that has aged so much it feels otherworldly. Machado de Assis’s books, however, are not like that. His books not only feel evergreen, but they also seem to anticipate the taste of a reader from a century and a half later.”