Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Jack Edmonds

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

I'm a mathematician because I'm too slow to be a writer.

My reasons are the same as for any mathematical conjecture: (1) It is a legitimate mathematical possibility, and (2) I do not know.

Training is doing your homework. It's not exciting. More often than not it's tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time, and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.

The classes of problems which are respectively known and not known to have good algorithms are of great theoretical interest. [...] I conjecture that there is no good algorithm for the traveling salesman problem. My reasons are the same as for any mathematical conjecture: (1) It is a legitimate mathematical possibility, and (2) I do not know.