Savage’s approach to research, via Mosteller:
As soon as a problem is stated, start right away to solve it. Use simple examples.
Keep starting from first principles, explaining again and again what you are trying to do.
Believe that this problem can be solved and that you will enjoy working it out.
Don’t be hampered by the original problem statement. Try other problems in its neighborhood; maybe there’s a better problem than yours.
Work an hour or so on it frequently.
Talk about it; explain it to people.
Quotes worth quoting:
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
—Jim Horning
Dealing with failure is easy: work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: you’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
—Alan J. Perlis
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
—Winston Churchill
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
—Poul Anderson
The difference between theory and practice: in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.
—Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
The most exciting phrase to hear in science is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny...”
—Isaac Asimov
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
—Howard Aiken
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
—Albert Einstein
Men never do evil so cheerfully and completely as when they do it from religious conviction.
—Blaise Pascal
I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, a blindness, an excitement, an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong. Techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions should be cultivated by every honest mathematician.
—John R. Stallings Jr. [on his false proof of Poincare’s conjecture]
For sheer brilliance I could divide all those whom I have taught into two groups: one contained a single outstanding boy, R. A. Fisher; the other all the rest.
—Arthur Vassal, Fisher's biology teacher at Harrow
[Fisher] fitted the classical definition of a gentleman: he never insulted anyone unintentionally.
—J.F. Crow
I occasionally meet geneticists who ask me whether it is true that the great geneticist R. A. Fisher was also an important statistician.
—L. J. Savage
If the topic of regression comes up in a trial, the side that must explain regression to the jury will lose.
—David A. Freedman
I believe that science progresses more if the communication is made easier. It's unfair to the reader, as well as the editor, to put out papers which are difficult to read, not because of the difficulty of the material but because of the sloppiness of the work and the carelessness in exposition.
—Ted Anderson
A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science... thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
—Herman Melville (via Thomas A. Harris)
To many people [psychiatry] is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
—Thomas A. Harris