Carl B Pomerance - Collected Quotes

"Factoring big numbers is a strange kind of mathematics that closely resembles the experimental sciences, where nature has the last and definitive word. […] as with the experimental sciences, both rigorous and heuristic analyses can be valuable in understanding the subject and moving it forward. And, as with the experimental sciences, there is sometimes a tension between pure and applied practitioners." (Carl B Pomerance, "A Tale of Two Sieves", The Notices of the American Mathematical Society 43, 1996)

"Maybe so, but something is going on with the primes." (Carl B Pomerance, [lecture] 1997) [response to Albert Einstein's "God doesn't play dice"]

"With randomness it is very unlikely to be embarrassed, but even if you get embarrassed, you can't replicate it'' (Carl B Pomerance, [lecture] 1997)

"Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems." (Carl B Pomerance, 2000)

"Prime numbers belong to an exclusive world of intellectual conceptions. We speak of those marvelous notions that enjoy simple, elegant description, yet lead to extreme - one might say unthinkable - complexity in the details. The basic notion of primality can be accessible to a child, yet no human mind harbors anything like a complete picture. In modern times, while theoreticians continue to grapple with the profundity of the prime numbers, vast toil and resources have been directed toward the computational aspect, the task of finding, characterizing, and applying the primes in other domains." (Richard Crandall & Carl B Pomerance, "Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective", 2001)

"You can ask the question about these ancient topics, such as perfect numbers and amicable numbers [...] and ask, are these good problems [...] studying them helped us develop all of elementary number theory and from elementary number theory we developed the rest of number theory, and also you can argue that from elementary number theory came algebra." (Carl B Pomerance, "Paul Erdős and the Rise of Statistical Thinking in Elementary Number Theory", [lecture] 2013)