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Quotes by Mathematician
"The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of 'Curses' makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of 'Hamlet' but none is planned."
"The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them."
"The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700."
"Players very widely disagree with me about what's hard and what's easy. and in a way, 'I won, but it was a fight' is the best compliment a game can receive."
"I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months."
"I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over."
1
"Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person."
"I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house."
"I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health."
"I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959."
"I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research."
"I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time."
"I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location."
"I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release."
"But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius."
"Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth."
1
"Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
4
"In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals."
"The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician."
"Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express."
"I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me."
"Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance."
"All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers."
"The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?"
"Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way."
"When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed."
"Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today."
"Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics."
"There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time."
"There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable."
Will,
"The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market."
"An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something."
"Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time."
"Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills."
"For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone."
"My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact."
"A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale."
"To address questions of scientific responsibility does not necessarily imply that one needs technical competence in a particular field (e.g. biology) to evaluate certain technical matters."
"What standards are upheld by the scientific community affect the community internally, and also affect its relations with society at large, including Congress."
"Questions have also arisen about AIDS being transmitted to hemophiliacs via blood transfusions."
"They cannot count on the press and they cannot count on Congressional committees to bring the problems of the scientific community to their own attention, or to police the scientific community."
"There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative."
"Roughly speaking, this hypothesis asks whether drug use causes some of the diseases officially associated with AIDS, such as immunodeficiency and Kaposi's sarcoma."
"Questions have arisen about the policing of science. Who is responsible for the policing? My answer is: all of us."
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