Math/Science/Computers
A formal manipulator in
mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil
surpasses him in intelligence. - Howard W. Eves
A linguist would be
shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is
open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as
"E is dense in itself". - J. E. Littlewood
A polar bear is a
rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.
A programmer is a person
who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after
innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated
with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures
taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of
problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable
mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly
defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information
in the first place. - IEEE Grid newsmagazine
Act in haste and repent
at leisure; Code too soon and debug forever. - Raymond Kennington
Advances are made by
answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. - Bernhard
Haisch, astrophysicist
Always code as if the
guy who ends up maintaining, or testing your code will be a violent psychopath
who knows where you live. - Dave Carhart
An Engineer is simply a
machine for turning coffee into assembler code.
Applicants must also
have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good
programming taste to not consider this an achievement. - Hal Abelson, MIT job
advertisement.
As a computer, I find
your faith in technology amusing.
As an adolescent I
aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a
meaningful vision of human life, so I became a scientist. This is like becoming
an archbishop so you can meet girls. - M. Cartmill
As soon as you start
kludging it, you know you're just about there. - Gene Sewell
Bad or missing mouse
driver. Spank cat? [Y/N]
Barium: what you do with
dead chemists.
Biology is the only
science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.
Black holes are where
God divided by zero.
Blessed are the
pessimists, for they make backups.
Charlie was a Chemist,
but Charlie is no more. What Charlie thought was H20 was H2SO4.
DOS Computers
manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others
are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide.
Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more
numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.
- New York Times, November 26, 1991
ERROR 155 - You can't do
that. - Data General S200 FORTRAN error code list
Everything you need to
know is on the Internet. You just can't find it.
Failure is not an
option... It already comes bundled with the software.
First law of science:
don't spit into the wind.
Forget all this talk
about reliability; if it plugs in, it's trouble.
Hitting your modem with
an aluminum baseball bat is only going to get you electrocuted. Try a wooden
one. - Lynn Marshall
Home pages are the pet
rock of the 90s. They all have them, they all think they're very cute. But in a
few years they're going to look back and be pretty embarrassed. - Kim Alm
I am acutely aware of
the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so
enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce. - Freeman
Dyson, 1972
I am not very
skeptical... a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to
avoid much loss of time, but I have met not a few men, who... have often thus
been deterred from experiments or observations which would have proven
servicable. - Charles Darwin
I can live with doubt
and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live
not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. - Richard Feynman
I have had my results
for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. - Karl
Friedrich Gauss
I love fools'
experiments, I am always making them. - Darwin
I tell my students that
artificial intelligence is a property that a machine has if it astounds you. -
Herbert Freeman
I want to know the
thoughts of God. Everything else is just details. - Albert Einstein
I know that most men,
including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom
accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige
them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in
explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which
they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. -Tolstoy
I’ve always wanted to
write a little program that would pop up a window saying, 'I'm going to
amputate a limb at random from you now,' to see how many people would
instinctively click OK.
If a program makes you
feel stupid, it's not because you are; it's because the person who wrote the
program is. - Arthur Naiman
If a thing is worth
doing, it's worth doing well - unless doing it well takes so long that it isn't
worth doing any more. Then you just do it 'good enough'. - Programming Perl,
Wall and Schwartz
If Bill Gates had a dime
for every time Windows crashed... Oh, wait a minute, he already does.
If I cannot use the
users as playthings, I don't really see too much purpose in having them on my
systems. - Chris Magagna
If I were a fraction, my
goal would be world denomination. - Chris Lipe
If it's not on fire then
it's a software problem.
If some unemployed punk
in New Jersey can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95 this
virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka.
If you disregard the
very simplest cases, there is in all of mathematics not a single infinite
series whose sum has been rigorously determined. In other words, the most
important parts of mathematics stand without a foundation. - Niels H. Abel
If you think C++ is not
overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual
private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one? - Tom Cargil,
C++ Journal
If you want to bake an
apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe. - Carl Sagan
If your experiment needs
statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment. - Ernest Rutherford
In mathematics, you
don't understand things. You just get used to them.- Johann von Neumann
In science as in love,
too much concentration on technique can often lead to impotence. - P. L. Berger
In theory, there is no
difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is a big difference.
Insofar as the laws of
mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they
refer to reality, they are not certain. - Albert Einstein
It is important to
realize that any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer. - Sun System
& Network Admin manual
It is our responsibility
as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory
philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of
thought, to proclaim value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be
feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to
all coming generations. - Richard P. Feynman
It is really quite
amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can
miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are
invesigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men
become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly
ahead of them. - Arthur C. Clarke, 1963
It is not uncommon for
engineers to accept the reality of phenomena that are not yet understood, as it
is very common for physicists to disbelieve the reality of phenomena that seem
to contradict contemporary beliefs of physics - H. Bauer
It's like religion.
Heresy [in science] is though of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the
opposite. - T. Gold
It would be very
discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann
hypothesis is correct and it said, `Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to
understand the proof.' - Ronald Graham
Life is good for only
two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics - Siméon Poisson
Like other occult
techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon
deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners. - G. O.
Ashley
Like the ski resort full
of girls hunting for husbands and husbands hunting for girls, the situation is
not as symmetrical as it might seem. - Alan Lindsay Mackay
Logic is the art of
going wrong with confidence. - Morris Kline
Managing senior
programmers is like herding cats. - Dave Platt
Mathematicians are like
Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language,
and forthwith it means something entirely different.- Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe
Mathematics consists of
proving the most obvious thing in the least obvious way. - George Polya
Microsoft is the only
corporate colossus in history whose entire product line could be eliminated
with a giant magnet.-David Shenk
Microsoft: One OS to
rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the
darkness bind them.
Never worry about theory
as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. - Robert A. Heinlein
New and stirring things
are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question
arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?' - H. G. Wells
Normal people don't
understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
- G. Harry Stine
Old programmers never
die. They just terminate and stay resident.
On two occasions I have
been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
Once you accept the universe
as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid
becomes easy. - Albert Einstein
One of the endearing
things about mathematicians is the extent to which they will go to avoid doing
any real work.- Matthew Pordage
One thing I have learned
in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive
and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. - Einstein
Or as Schrodinger's wife
once said, "What did you do to the cat? It looks half dead."
Pi R squared? Nooo! Pie
R round, cornbread R square!
Profanity: the universal
programming language
Programming is like sex:
One mistake and you support it a lifetime. - Paul S. Sears
Quantum particles: The
dreams that stuff is made of.
Save the whales. Feed
the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Science is a
differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition. - Alan Turing
Skeptic's Law: If it
violates known theory, it must be pseudoscience.
Since the mathematicians
have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.-
Albert Einstein
Smash forehead on
keyboard to continue.
Something is wrong. -
ATARI 520ST and 1040ST BASIC error warning
Sometimes I think we're
alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea
is quite staggering. - Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes it pays to
stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging
Monday's code. – Dan Salomon
The best way to
accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec. – Marcus Dolengo
The danger from
computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but we will
meanwhile agree to meet them halfway. – Bernard Avishai
The facts, although
interesting, are irrelevant.
The moment I win the
lottery, my computer becomes the world's most expensive boat anchor. - Jacques
Hughes
The most important thing
in the application development is the name. An application will not succeed
without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am
looking for a suitable application.
The most likely way for
the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we
come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. - Nathaniel
Borenstein
The most overlooked
advantage of owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against
whacking them around a little. - Porterfield
The person who thinks
there can be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very
young in science or very ignorant of religion. - Joseph Henry, early American
physicist
The use of 'goto'
statements is discouraged, especially with the label HELL
The weaker the math, the
more elaborate the graphics need to be.
There are children
playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics,
because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. - Robert
Oppenheimer
There are three kinds of
death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's
being off the network. – Guy Almes
There are three roads to
ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the
quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians. - Georges
Pompidou
There are two major
products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a
coincidence. – Jeremy S. Anderson
There is no order; there
is no chaos. Only patterns of increasing perplexity.
There is only one
nature. The division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a
natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited
capacity to comprehend the whole. - Bill Wulf
Those who do not
understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer
Trust the computer
industry to shorten "Year 2000" to "Y2K". It was this kind
of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.
Under the most
rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity,
and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
UNIX is user friendly.
It's just selective about who its friends are.
Unnamed Law: If it
happens, it must be possible.
Usually mathematicians
have to shoot somebody to get this much publicity. - Thomas R. Nicely (on the
attention he received after finding the flaw in Intel's Pentium chip in 1994)
We forget that you
cannot impress software, no matter what your rank. - Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
We offer them mediocrity
while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software,
seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course,
the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is. - Larry Constantine
We used to think that if
we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we
must learn a great deal more about `and'. - Sir Arthur Eddington
We've all heard that a
million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the
entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not
true. - University of Cambridge Professor Robert Silensky
When a distinguished but
elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly
right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Arthur C. Clarke's First Law
When asked to testify
that Emmy Noether was a great woman mathematician, E. Landau said, "I can
testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot
swear."
Why did the chicken
cross the Moebius strip? To get to the other... er... um...
"Why is the sky
blue?" "It's a fault in the universe's ray tracing algorithm."
Windows 95: n. 32 bit
extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating
system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company
that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
Word cannot edit the
unknown. - error message from Word 6.0, 1993
You are in a maze of
twisty little passages, all alike. - the original Adventure computer game
You know we all became
mathematicians for the same reason: we were lazy. - Max Rosenlicht