Ver Natus

Michelangelo Buonarroti

"Burning, I remain in the shadow,
As the setting sun retreats into its glow.
The others have gone to their life of pleasure,
I alone lie grieving, with the earth my measure"

"Alas! Alas! For the way I've been betrayed by rushing time!
By a mirror too, that told, had I conned it close, a story all too true.
It happens so, when regard's long overdue, like mine, for life's end.
But time's parade goes swiftly by, and overnight we're old.
Too late to repent, to set things right, to hold counsel within, with death obtruding so.
My own self was my foe.
Of no avail how much I weep and sigh: nothing annuls the waste of days gone by.
Alas! Alas! Reviewing all those days
There's not one-not one!-I come on there, in all that time, I truly call my own."

"Mine then, the power to give us, you and me, a long survival in-choose it-stone or color, faces just like our own, exact and true.
Though we're dead a thousand years, still men can see how beautiful you were. I, how much duller, and yet how far from a fool in loving you."

"So if my tears' constant flow
can dissolve a heart so hard,
far better I not exist
than live in fire and never die."

"A man who's truly wise,
not magnifying his own stature,
deals with no pleasure not within his power-too much can paralyze-
a modest creature of modest fortune lives quietly, hour by hour."

"When love's been weighed, assayed reined nobly in,
he who loves what nature gives commits no sin."

"When one lives—truly lives!—his will won't mesh with mortality;
nor are things eternal cast in the mould of time.

"Both ways torment me then:
being helped, being hurt-both deadly.
But we've seen who greatly love find worse:
being in between."

"The pilgrim soul can spy its own salvation in sport of love or war:
knowing how to lose beats scavenging for more"

Fred Terman

"Fred Terman was a fascinating person, enthusiastic about everything he said or did. His enthusiasm permeated his laboratory and spilled over into the work of his students. At the end of each working day, he appeared in the laboratory, sat on the laboratory bench with his legs dangling, and asked questions or made suggestions or just chatted about life in general."

Terman visited the home of Oswald G. Villard Jr. in New York City, in part to assure Villard's father that a Yale honors graduate in English literature could profitably enroll as a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford.

"It seems that all of his graduates are good. Now these students don't just accidentally come to Stanford, he goes out and gets them—and he never brings back a bad one. And Terman kept track of them. He seems to know where every student he ever had is, what he's doing, how he's getting along, and how he likes his job."

"You certainly exploited the basic principle understood by so few that the quality of an educational program depends much more on the person on whom one spends his money, than on how much money is spent, or the gross number of new appointments made!"

Terman was a great teacher, Packard felt, who had the unique ability to make a very complex problem seem the "essence of simplicity."

"Fred didn't give a damn what people thought about him or whether he stepped on toes." - Fred Glover

"I got a telephone call from Fred Terman at 11 o'clock one New Year's Eve," remembered Fred Glover. "He wasn't aware it was New Year's Eve." On another occasion, Glover found Terman coming down to the office the day after Christmas with a caddie full of dictating roles. "He'd worked all week. He just worked constantly."

Sterling said "In 1955, Fred Terman became Provost. Never have I worked more harmoniously with an extremely able colleague. He did take responsibility. He had an extra sense for spotting younger men of real ability. Work was his hobby, and it was after his appointment as Provost that Stanford really began to make headway."

Alexander Grothendieck

"Curiosity alone, that thirst for knowledge within us, is capable of stimulating such an effortless alertness and vivacity in the face of the immense and ubiquitous inertia of so-called "natural downward slopes" consisting of ready-made ideas expressing our fears and our conditioning."

"To phrase it differently: I learned in those crucial years to "be alone". That is, I learned to approach the things which I want to know with my own eyes, rather than rely on the expressed or implicit ideas that emanate from the group with which I identify, or a group to which I attribute authority."

"If I excelled in the art of mathematics, it was not through the ability and perseverance to solve problems left by my predecessors, but rather through a natural tendency within me to discover questions, evidently crucial, yet that nobody had yet seen, or to excavate the "right notions" that were missing (often without anyone realizing until the new notion appeared), as well as the "right statements" of which nobody had thought."

"Without ever having to spell it out for myself, I knew that I had from that point onwards become the servant to a great task: that of exploring this immense and unknown world, of apprehending its contours all the way to the farthest frontiers; and at the same time, of roaming in every direction and establishing with tenacious and methodical care the inventory of neighboring and distant provinces alike, drawing maps with scrupulous fidelity and precision, in which the smallest of hamlets and cottages would find their place..."

"To tell the truth, until two years ago, my relationship with mathematics was limited (with the exception of teaching) to the act of doing it - following an impulse that ceaselessly moved me forward, into an "unknown" that continually attracted me. The idea never occurred to me to stop in my stride and to interrogate myself, to turn around even for an instant and perhaps to see the outline of a path taken, or to situate past work."

"You might then learn that the burial undertaken by all and with your participation (be it active or through your tacit acquiescence) did not only affect someone else's work, the fruits and testimony of his frenetic love affair with mathematics; rather, at a deeper and more hidden level than this (unspoken) burial, there is a living and essential part of your own being, and of your original power to know, to love, and to create, which you have elected to bury with your own hands in the guise of another person."

"What characterizes the value of the ingenuity and imagination of a researcher is the quality of his attention as he listens to the voice of things - for the things of the Universe never tire of talking about themselves and to reveal themselves to he who cares to listen. Thus, the most beautiful house, that in which the love of the builder is most evident, is not that which is larger or higher than the others. Rather, a house is beautiful if it faithfully reflects the structure and beauty hidden in things."

John D. Rockefeller

"You can abuse me, you can strike me, so long as you let me have my way"

He liked to make Standard Oil sound like a philanthropic agency or an angel of mercy, come to succor downtrodden refiners. "We will take your burdens," he remembered telling his weaker brethren in 1872. "We will utilize your ability; we will give you representation; we will unite together and build a substantial structure on the basis of cooperation."

"Do not many of those who fail to achieve big things... fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?"

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee," he once said, "and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun."

"I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him. "Poulets!" he would exclaim. "What are poulets, John?" Or again, "Bougies, bougies—what in the world is a bougie?" And so on down the bill. Father was never willing to pay a bill which he did not know to be correct in all its items. Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle."

"Of course it is natural that the man who drove the stage coach should be antagonistic to the railroad and that the man who used to keep the small inn should look with disfavor upon the big, magnificent hotels"

Rockefeller placed a premium on recruiting the best people for leading positions. "John, we have money," he told his son, "but it will have value for mankind only as we can find able men with ideas, imagination and courage to put it into productive use."

"Probably the greatest single obstacle to the progress and happiness of the American people, lies in the willingness of so many men to invest their time and money in multiplying competitive industries instead of opening up new fields, and putting their money into lines of industry and development that are needed"

Claude Shannon

"He stood on the doorstep of his room and the living room," she recalls. "He didn't come in. Kind of shy. Didn't want to get into that. I threw popcorn on him. And he said, do you want to hear some great music?" - Shannon at an MIT party meeting his wife

They had to seek him out. And in calling on him (knocking on his door, writing, visiting) one had to penetrate his shyness or elusiveness or—in the case of expecting a reply to a letter—his intractable habits of procrastination and his unwillingness to do anything that bored him.

He would acknowledge that building devices like chess-playing machines "might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money. But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity." "He never argued his ideas," Brock McMillan says of Shannon. "If people didn't believe in them, he ignored those people."

"He would frequently receive letters from some of the most notable scientists in the world. And these, too, would languish. David Slepian recalls that the letters would eventually get herded into a folder he had labeled "Letters I've procrastinated in answering for too long."

"My characterization of his smartness is that he would have been the world's best con man if he had taken a turn in that direction," Slepian says

"He once told an interviewer, "I think you impute a little more practical purpose to my thinking than actually exists. My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, I'm thinking, 'What if it were like this?' or, 'Is there an interesting problem of this type?' … It's usually just that I like to solve a problem, and I work on these all the time."

Then a rumor spread that Shannon was there. As one of the attendees later told Scientific American, "it was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference." Later, when Shannon was asked to speak, he grew anxious, believing he had little of value to say, and took several balls out of his pocket. And then he juggled for the crowd."