quotes

"Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." - John von Neumann

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. - John von Neumann

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.  - John von Neumann

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." - John von Neumann

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature … If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.  - Feynman

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.  - Feynman

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.  - Feynman

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. - Feynman

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! - Feynman

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.  - Feynman

I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. - Feynman

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things. - Feynman

"You know, for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination. But he has become a poet and now he is fine." - David Hilbert

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."  - Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

"God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."- André Weil

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.  ~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.  ~Albert Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically.  ~Albert Einstein

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.  ~Henri Poincaré

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident … of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. (E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic)

“"For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him." - Gospel of Matthew (useful for preferential attachment)

"Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation." - Pierre-Simon Laplace

“The actual science of logic is conversant at present only with things either certain, impossible, or entirely doubtful, none of which (fortunately) we have to reason on. Therefore the true logic for this world is the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind.” — James Clerk Maxwell (1850)

“A Bayesian is one who has a reverential awe for all opinions except those of a frequentist statistician.” - Stephen Senn (www.rmm-journal.de/downloads/Article_Senn.pdf)

“Bayesians are the only people who can feel marginalized after being integrated.” - from Yann LeCun’s Google+ feed

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." -- Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase.”

"A child of five would understand this.  Send someone to fetch a child of five." -- Groucho Marx

"AI makes philosophy honest." - Dan Dennett

"It all adds up to normality." — Greg Egan, Quarantine

“If you blur your eyes, you can see more clearly” - Umesh Vazirani (relevant to course-to-fine inference, and abstraction in general)

“Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up.” - Fred Jelinek (then of the IBM speech group) (1998)

The trouble with integers is that we have examined only the very small ones. Maybe all the exciting stuff happens at really big numbers, ones we can’t even begin to think about in any very definite way. Our brains have evolved to get us out of the rain, find where the berries are, and keep us from getting killed. Our brains did not evolve to help us grasp really large numbers or to look at things in a hundred thousand dimensions.

—Ronald Graham

Only math nerds would call $2^{500}$ finite.

—Leonid Levin

The biggest difference between time and space is that you can’t reuse time.

—Merrick Furst

Computing is normally done by writing certain symbols on paper. We may suppose this paper is divided into squares like a child’s arithmetic book.

— Alan M. Turing

"If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered."

-- Howard Aiken

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.   (explaining nondeterminism?)

— Yogi Berra

“You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” -- John von Neumann

"I get the feeling that the computer just skips over all the comments." -- Anonymous student

“Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time. - Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.

“I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.” -- Benjamin Franklin

“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” - E.B. White

A finite automaton knows That counting takes fingers and toes. But, footless and handless, It tries, never endless, To follow five 1’s with five 0’s. -- (from the STOC 1971 program)

A woman in liquor production Owns a still of exquisite construction. The alcohol boils Through magnetic coils. She says that it's "proof by induction."

from Claire mathieu's blog:

"Today I was teaching reductions. I found a relevant quote on wikipedia:

Q: How do you shoot a blue elephant? A: With a blue elephant gun.

Q: How do you shoot a yellow elephant? A: Have you ever seen a yellow elephant?

Q: How do you shoot a red elephant? A: Hold his trunk shut until he turns blue, and then shoot him with the blue elephant gun.

Q: How do you shoot a purple elephant? A: Paint him red, hold his trunk shut until he turns blue, and then shoot him with the blue elephant gun."

A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". In what we denote as "primitive societies", the superstition that knowing someone's true name gives you magic power over him is not unusual … nor are we above the equally primitive superstition that we can gain some control over some unknown, malicious demon by calling it by a safe, familiar, and innocent name, such as "engineering".

• Edsger W. Dijkstra (On the cruelty of really teaching computing science)

There is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement.  A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all.  The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things.

When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless. The remedy is specific knowledge and in-depth study. When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky

"Social science is an example of a science that isn't a science. They follow the data .. But they don't get any laws. They haven't found anything. ..Maybe someday they will, but they haven't yet .. I know what it means to know something .. and .. I have a great suspicion that they don't know." - Feynman

My short-trousered self didn't know a vector from a hole in the ground and had never heard of a Cartesian plane. But I was amazed by the fact that such a simple set of rules could be used to generate an amazing variety of sometimes quite beautiful images. That, for me, sums up the seductive intellectual core of computers and computer programming: here is a magic black box. You can tell it to do whatever you want, within a certain set of rules, and it will do it; within the confines of the box you are more or less God, your powers limited only by your imagination. But the price of that power is strict discipline: you have to really know what you want, and you have to be able to express it clearly in a formal, structured way that leaves no room for the fuzzy thinking and ambiguity found everywhere else in life. The computer is an invaluably remorseless master: harsh, sometimes to the point of causing you to tear your hair out, but never unfair. If something you tried doesn't work, then you made a mistake (somewhere). The sense of freedom on offer - the ability to make the machine dance to any tune you care to play - is thrilling. And the discipline of expressing your thoughts in remorseless, rigorous logic is wonderful mental exercise.

• • T.C. in the economist: http://economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/08/computing_schools

Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as those ways don't exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.

Brandon Watson: http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2010/09/success-and-failure-of-arguments.html

The Sophisticate:  "The world isn't black and white.  No one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray.  Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."

The Zetet:  "Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade.  You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view…"

-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

"You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - Zombie Marie Curie, in xkcd.com/896

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Howard Thurman

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“There is no speed limit” - Derek Sivers (http://sivers.org/kimo/)

from facebook:

I chucked the law for astronomy, and I knew that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered. -Edwin Hubble

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers; you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age. -Richard Feynman

I think grown-ups just act like they know what they're doing. -Calvin

What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men. -G.H. Hardy

The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all. -Kurt Gödel

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

• Ian Maclaren

Every extension proposal should be required to be accompanied by a kidney. People would submit only serious proposals, and nobody would submit more than two.  — Jim Waldo (referring to C++ ?)

best rationality quotes: http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~daniel/rationality_quotes_2012/rq_only2012.html

(also saved in dropbox papers)

advice on technical writing: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/margo/writing.html http://tex.loria.fr/typographie/mathwriting.pdf

advice on giving talks and academia: http://www.math.osu.edu/~nevai.1/MYMATH/rota_ams_notices_01_97.html

(“ten lessons I wish I’d been taught) http://ergodicity.net/2012/07/03/advice-on-giving-talks-2/