Monday, September 14, 2015

Interesting Quotes

Here are some interesting quotes that passed by me over the past few days:

Choose a discipline you love and you'll never work a day in your life likely because that field isn't hiring. (ShitAcademicsSay)

Asymptotics is the art of knowing where to be sloppy and where to be precise. - Concrete Mathematics (via John D Cook)

You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. (von Neumann to Claude Shannon)

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed — it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. (Alan J. Perlis)

For some people, "substitute X for Y" means replace X with Y. For others, replace Y with X. (Grant Barrett)

I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. von Neumann

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. (Alan J. Perlis)

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