Quotes

• "Oh *$@! three M's" - 1993
• "Student: "what's that word there?" Colin Rourke: "what?...ah that's 'thru' it means through...I'll write it out in full" [writes 'trough']" - 1993
• "Sorry, I have deliberately made that complicated by using words you understand" - 1994
• "I'm no good with numbers. [said in his first lecture to first year undergraduates]" - 1994
• "Size doesn't matter" - 1994
• "An example of a geometry that is not Euclidean is non-Euclidean geometry" - 1994
• "This is very easy to draw, if you're not drunk" - 1994
• "It almost looks right" - 1994
• "I'm bound to make a mistake" - 1994
• "It should come out" - 1994
• "You forget which finger is which" - 1994
• "[In the middle of a proof] HELP!" - 1994
• "Let's try and devise a notation that means something" - 1994
• "I don't like square roots" - 1994
• "...so I can't go wrong" - 1994
• "It's gone wrong" - 1994
• "There's a bit of fiddling around here" - 1994
• "Your imagination is better than my drawing" - 1994
• "It amazes me how the lights flash when you turn the motors on and off" - 1994
• "Hyperbolic flower beds tend to go outside the garden" - 1994
• "It's very interesting what curves you can get when you let things slide around on stuff" - 1994
• "I had to distort it in order to make it plausible" - 1994
• "Those are straight lines, I've just drawn them curvy" - 1994
• "I did it right, but I got it very bad" - 1994
• "Let's draw it over here because it's much more suggestive" - 1994
• "This is non-examinable in the sense that I won't set any questions on it" - 1994
• "Infinity is down here somewhere [pointing to the bottom of the blackboard]" - 1994
• "A horrible piece of algebra ... that is just a few lines long" - 1994
• "Once you've got the equation of the tangent, you can see it's a tangent" - 1994
• "It's sort of clear,if you do it right" - 1994
• "Think of sets as being like a door. They are either open or closed. Oh no, wait. A door can be ajar." - 2000
• "All proofs are by contradiction... [shortly followed by:] Wait, that's not true. It's amazing the stupid things you say when you're stood up here." - 2004
• "All of you look confused... am I speaking Chinese? [Then after realising that the entire first four rows consisted of people from China:] Oh wait, thats a silly thing to say in a roomful of Chinese people. Am I speaking Russian? Gosh I hope there are no Russians in here!" - 2005
• "[When nobody offered an answer to one of his questions, he shouted] You are all so thick!" - 2005
• "They should ban nine o'clock lectures, though of course then they would have to ban ten o'clock lectures by induction." - 2005
• "This proof is morally the same as one you have already seen." - 2005
• "It's supposed to look like a curly T, but it looks more like a bow tie with a silly leg on it." - 2005
• "And I'm going to use green chalk for this, can you see green at the back? [No answer]. Well I'd better not use green; if I use green you can't even hear me!" - 2005
• "I'm running on automatic, and automatic has just gone wrong." - 2005
• "My shoelaces just won't stay done up today...Maybe the chalk lubricates them, they always seem to come undone when I'm lecturing." - 2005
• "Since we can't decide on a statement, let's go for a proof [of the statement that hasn't been decided on]." - 2005
• "I'm going to push the proof of that one under the carpet." - 2005
• "Why does the red chalk always go missing first? It must be red shift." - 2009