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Quotes by Mathematician
"It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded."
"If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought."
"I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
"A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding."
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
"I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account."
"I had not yet gotten into the world of light. But I felt as one who, standing outside, could knock against the wall and hear an answering knock from within."
"If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard."
"In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate."
"A suggestion had been made to me looking toward a professorship in some Western college, but after due consideration, I declined to consider the matter."
"One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars."
"What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed."
"When about fifteen I once made a great scandal by taking out my knife in prayer meeting and assaulting a young man who, while I was kneeling down during the prayer, stood above me and squeezed my neck."
"Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it."
Sun,
"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
"Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment."
"As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity."
"Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope."
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."
"The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington."
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."
"As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest."
"My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men."
1
"Though born in Nova Scotia, I am of almost pure New England descent."
"The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war."
"In 1860 a total eclipse of the sun was visible in British America."
"The reports of the eclipse parties not only described the scientific observations in great detail, but also the travels and experiences, and were sometimes marked by a piquancy not common in official documents."
"So far as the economic condition of society and the general mode of living and thinking were concerned, I might claim to have lived in the time of the American Revolution."
"Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird."
Will,
"Until I was four years old I lived in the house of my paternal grandfather, about two miles from the pretty little village of Wallace, at the mouth of the river of that name."
"My first undertaking in the way of scientific experiment was in the field of economics and psychology."
"The result was that, if it happened to clear off after a cloudy evening, I frequently arose from my bed at any hour of the night or morning and walked two miles to the observatory to make some observation included in the programme."
"My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher."
"In October, 1865, occurred what was, in my eyes, the greatest event in the history of the observatory. The new transit circle arrived from Berlin in its boxes."
"For a fortnight nobody at all emailed me, or posted a follow-up. Doesn't anyone care, I thought? It turned out my newsreader was broken, and hadn't posted at all."
"I don't really believe in 'directions' in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that's all."
Art,
"By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large."
"At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups."
"A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game."
"If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that."
"If you're setting a game during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look through a library. find out what people were wearing, what other issues were in the news, how houses were furnished, what cars were being driven. Especially include things which now seem foreign."
"Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!"
"Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity."
"What I would pay much more attention to are the few points where the player can inadvertently make a career decision. Most players end up back-tracking, though some actually enjoy this."
"This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell."
Open,
"Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that."
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