Quotations by Julian Coolidge

[Upon proving that the best betting strategy for "Gambler's Ruin" was to bet all on the first trial.]
It is true that a man who does this is a fool. I have only proved that a man who does anything else is an even bigger fool.
Quoted in H Eves Return to Mathematical Circles (Boston 1988).

The unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, but they had better lead to something interesting.
Quoted in D MacHale, Comic Sections (Dublin 1993)

The present author confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art ...
A Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves

JOC/EFR February 2006

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