Paul Wright E-mail username: paulrite E-mail extension: @gmail.com Important note: This website will become obsolete in January 2012, when I am leaving the University of Maryland for a job outside of academia. I plan to leave this website up for the benefit of any of my colleagues or former students who might wish to retrieve information from it. If you would like to contact me after December 2011, you can do so at the e-mail address above.

Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.
--E. Kasner and J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
--Nikolai Lobatchevsky, in N. Rose's Mathematical Maxims and Minims, Raleigh, NC: Rome Press Inc., 1988.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
--Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.