Quotes by Alonzo Church

“I was generally interested in things of a fundamental nature. As an undergraduate I even published a minor paper about the Lorentz transformation, the foundation of (special) relativity theory.”

“Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.”

“The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.”

“I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.”

“I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.”

“Veblen was a great advocate of getting together informally. His teas were in the same spirit. He believed in taking long walks through the woods to discuss mathematical research.”