"The official String theory website"; good resource; some interesting interviews under the 'people section'.

Some selected comments;

" I would say the biggest impact on mathematics has been as a whole new collection of results and conjectures where you have to deal with, broadly speaking, with what you might call dualities, where the same thing can appear two different guises. In the physics framework these dualities are broadly understood at some conceptual level, even if not technically, and in the mathematics, the dual picture comes out to be totally different. So it's a great challenge for the mathematicians on the ground, to see what we got from the sky, these two things may go together. Working out how that is going to work out in detail is going to be a big challenge for mathematicians. It has transformed and revitalized and revolutionized large parts of mathematics. And so you could say that mathematics in the first half of the 20th century, large parts of it, will be devoted to understanding the impact of string theory on physics and mathematics. ...

And using infinite-dimensional ideas, you get back, of course, results in finite dimensions, that's the miracle. ...

And the reason is of course because mathematics has this great propensity to unify.

 Logical thinking is a key part of mathematics, but it's by no means the only part. You've got to have a lot of input and material from somewhere, you've got to have ideas coming from physics, concepts from geometry. You've got to have imagination, you're going to use intuition, guesswork, vision, like a creative artist has.

But you mustn't get carried away by the other extreme. You mustn't go all the time with airy-faery ideas that you can't actually write and solve a problem. That's a danger. But you've got to have a balance between being able to be disciplined and solve problems and apply logical thinking when necessary. And at other times you've got to be able to freely float in the atmosphere like a poet and imagine the whole universe of possibilities, and hope that eventually you come down to Earth somewhere else."

 - Michael Atiyah

"Learn as much as you can about what interests you and start to think about what questions you'd most like to answer. I think though that generally, everyone on the web page, and everyone in the field, can serve as a role model for aspiring scientists. One of the great things about science is that it brings together people from all walks of life, interested in the same questions, who talk about it in much the same way." Eva Silverstein

"I was a graduate student in 1984 in Oxford when John Schwarz and Michael Green came up with the first real evidence that string theory could well be the Final Theory, that the Theory of Everything, and there was nothing more exciting to work on at that point, and I've stayed with string theory ever since.

I don't really know what the cause of that problem is, but I think one key way to keep enrollment up and to make it grow is to have the ideas of science communicated at a very early age to students. Because the ideas are terribly exciting. But sometimes I do get the sense that students are put off by the difficulty of the technical side of physics and of mathematics. But I think students would be more willing to engage with that difficult technical material if they were real fired up about the ideas. And the ideas themselves are so rich and rewarding that if they are presented in a way that can be absorbed without the technical side at an earlier stage, I think the willingness to go forward in these difficult areas would be stronger.

the thing that excites me about physics is that it really seeks to answer some of the deepest questions about the physical universe. And besides physics, the other area of science which I think is on par with it but in a different arena is the science of the mind." Brian Greene, author of the Elegant Universe