The following is a selection of quotes by U.C. San Diego Mathematics professor Sam Buss, taken during the 1997-1998 school year, in U.C. San Diego's Math 260A/260B, a series of Set Theory classes. WINTER QUARTER -------------- "Why study set theory? The Mount Everest reason -- because it's there." 12:26 pm 5 January 1998 "I like to write a lot on the board... this is gonna crimp my style." 12:35 pm 5 January 1998 "I'm going to state this in its full glory, even though it's confusing." 12:57 pm 7 January 1998 "We could still worry about the integers in the dot dot dot portion of the definition." 12:42 pm 12 January 1998 "Later on we're going to show we didn't really need the Axiom of Foundation, so we need to have not used it here." 12:57 pm 12 January 1998 "Seven... eight? Well, so much for me being good at ordinals." 12:39 pm 16 January 1998 "One more theorem, and then we'll see how much time we have for intuition." 1:03 pm 16 January 1998 "Lemme just write it one way and see if it's wrong." 12:52 pm 21 January 1998 "Every polka-dotted giraffe in this room has bad breath." 12:53 pm 23 January 1998 "How do we formalize this in a quick but hard to understand definition?" 12:57 pm 23 January 1998 "At some point we should have a warm fuzzy feeling about defining addition by transfinite induction." 1:04 pm 23 January 1998 "Of course, this ordinal number is bigger than this merely finite number." [Editor's note: The merely finite number in question was 10^(10^46).] 12:45 pm 28 January 1998 "Everybody is getting more lax... except for the president." [Editor's note: This quote occured during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.] 12:58 pm 30 January 1998 "I guess it's better to have a lemma than a theorem named after you." 12:27 pm 2 February 1998 "Some people's half pages are different than other people's half pages." 12:59 pm 4 February 1998 "In a hundred years, they'll think we're silly not to have thought of using infinitesimals, and the physicists will explain how they knew about them all along." 12:21 pm 6 February 1998 "You can do it... but the universe is not such a pretty place." 12:57 pm 9 February 1998 "This is a bit more power than I need, but so what? It's a proof." 12:34 pm 11 February 1998 "Everything I'm doing requires the Axiom of Choice, so don't worry about it." 1:55 pm 18 February 1998 "At some point we need to use kappa > 2, so let's keep our eyes out for it." 1:02 pm 23 February 1998 "This isn't Plato's point of view, because Plato didn't study set theory." 1:02 pm 27 February 1998 "Questions on this before I go back to mathematics?" 12:40 pm 9 March 1998 "First of all, I want to start off with a proper definition of truth." 12:54 pm 9 March 1998 SPRING QUARTER -------------- "We'll always break ties with parentheses." 12:43 pm 30 March 1998 "We just punt in this case." 1:26 pm 8 April 1998 "Why don't I elevate this claim to a lemma?" 12:24 pm 10 April 1998 "We'll see what I mean when I mean it." 12:28 pm 10 April 1998 "Let's take set theory, just to keep you confused." 12:58 pm 15 April 1998 "That looks like a foreign language." C. Parker "It IS a foreign language." S. Buss 1:33 pm 15 April 1998 [Editor's note: The foreign language in question was Hebrew.] "You gotta watch out for the vacuous quantifiers." 12:58 pm 17 April 1998 "This generalizes the property of going from finite to infinite to the property of going from big to really big." 1:11 pm 29 April 1998 "It's probably true... but you can't prove it." 1:46 pm 29 April 1998 "It used to be that the set of pizza places that could deliver to UCSD defined {Dominoes}. Let's hope that it doesn't now define the empty set." 12:41 pm 1 May 1998 "Being human beings and not formal systems, we're not bound by the merely infinite." 12:27 pm 8 May 1998 "I claim we've already proven this... it's just a matter of noticing it." 12:53 pm 8 May 1998