David Mumford Quotes

United States, Mathematician
June 11, 1937

David Bryant Mumford is an American mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry, and then for research into vision and pattern theory. He won the Fields Medal and was a MacArthur Fellow. In 2010 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He is currently a University Professor Emeritus in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University.

Images of the world are Renormalization Group fixed points.

David Mumford
- World
- Images
- Points
The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.

David Mumford
- Possibilities
- Illuminating

The world is a very complicated place, as babies know.

David Mumford
- World
- Complicated
- Babies
The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete.

David Mumford
My own view is that no major advance was ever found as a result of a committee's recommendation... We should be honest in telling these agencies we often don't know where some ideas are going to lead, but we hope they are going to clarify a problem.

David Mumford
- Problem
- Honest
- Agency
Art lives on the mental plane (the real painting is not the set of dry pigments on the canvas nor is a symphony the sequence of sound waves that convey it to our ear) but, as the post-modernists insist, is reinterpreted in new contexts by each appreciator. As for gossip, which includes the vast majority of our thoughts, its essence is its relation to a unique local part of time and space.

David Mumford
Logic has virtually nothing to do with the way we think.

David Mumford
- Thinking
- Science
- Way
I am accustomed, as a professional mathematician, to living in a sort of vacuum, surrounded by people who declare with an odd sort of pride that they are mathematically illiterate.

David Mumford
- People
- Pride
- Math

I think that mathematics can benefit by acknowledging that the creation of good models is just as important as proving deep theorems.

David Mumford
Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

David Mumford
A Noah's Ark of mathematicians, their lives, loves, hard times, and madnesses, Loving and Hating Mathematics shows our community with all its warts as well as its triumphs. I especially liked the chapter on much-hated school mathematics, 'Almost All Children Left Behind.'

David Mumford
- Life
- Children
- Love