§ Big list of quotes


"can you keep a secret father?" Priest says "yes son", and the
heretic replies "so can I."

John von Neuman,e one of the greatest mathematicians and computer scientists
of the 20th century, regarding the danger of mathematics driven solely by
internal esthetics: “There is a grave danger that the subject will develop
along the line of least resistance.”

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design 2.
To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why
it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design 20.
A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design 31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development)
You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.

this book fills a much needed gap in the literature.

The advantages of implicit definition over construction are
roughly those of theft over honest toil.

"If you think experts are expensive, wait and see what amateurs will cost you."

“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever.
The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.
How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles.
If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.
But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.
To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”

A simple theory of aesthetics:
If the best stuff from then is still better than good stuff from now, it's art
If the best stuff from then is worse than bad stuff from now, it's technology



If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on
the quality of our worst work. But science is a strong-link problem: progress
depends on the quality of our best work.

Pirates of the caribbean: Take what you can, give nothing back.




How can Alice communicate all of math to Bob? Mail him some chalk and wait!

Love is not a craving, love is a yearning. ~ Contrapoints.

If Alice uses abstract algebra to solve problem and Bob uses concrete calculation, Alice's result is more generalizable than Bob's,
while Bob's method is more generalizable than Alice's.
This is one reason why combining the two approaches is so valuable.
You can start with something you know will work but may not unlock a great mystery, and then look for patterns that clue you in to a wider story.

"There are two kinds of scientific progress:
the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge,
and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries.
Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn nonetheless for the latter"

you can be dead right. (Being right has a time and a place)

Bott also used to say that a cocyle was "something that hovers over a space
and when it sees a cycle, pounces on it and spits out a number".

I'm not complaining here, quite the opposite: this story is really quite
exciting and the work mentioned is both real and fascinating. We are
essentially back to the days when Newton tried to explain the nature of
gravity looking at Kepler's laws trying various options and separating what
works from what doesn't. I'm only saying that the famous "physicists'
intuition", which is so overrated, is actually just the benevolence of
Nature. Why should the Nature be so benevolent to us remains a mystery and I
know neither a physicist, nor a mathematician, who could shed any light on
that. The best explanation so far is contained in Einstein's words "God is
subtle, but not malicious", or, in a slightly less enigmatic form, "Nature
conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning".

Whoever is meek to the cruel ones, is cruel to the meek.

Treat everybody the same v/s treat everybody fairly.

"Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
-- Confucius

"Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left
and live it properly." - Marcus Aurelius

It is only when a mosquito sits on your testicles do you learn that some
problems must be solved without violence.

The threat is greater than the execution. ~ GM Danya

No guest should be admitted without a date of departure ~ Violet, Downton Abbey

Not knowing things isn't dumb; pretending to know is.

magic is when you have expended more effort to achieve a trick than
observers think is reasonable. That you've spent hundreds of hours practising
with decks of cards, that you've built a secret passageway across your stage,
that you've erected an enormous mirror in a public place, etc..

Knuth says something similar (on his web page I think). He says he doesn't
read email because email is good for people who want to stay on top of things
but he wants to get to the bottom of things.

"In the past everything was better, even the future" (K. Valentin, translated)

You never rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.

"the mark of an enlightened mind is the ability to entertain ideas without
accepting them"

The most intelligent creature in the universe is a rock.
None would know it because they have lousy I/O.

Now symmetry and consistency are convertible terms - thus Poetry
and Truth are one ~ Noether's theorem?

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
(Alan Turing, quoted in J.D. Barrow, “Theories of everything”)

(I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional
activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with
people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)
~ Ron Garret at JPL

“Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.”

A cylinder will roll like a sphere in one direction but not roll like a cube
in the other. That doesn't make it a sphere and a cube at the same time. It
makes it something different. (in analogy to wave-particle duality)

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else
can see..

Raising your floor (consistency) is just as important as raising your ceiling
(skill)

"The sky is the limit, so lets build rockets!"

The manner in which the mathematician works his way towards discovery by
shifting his confidence from intuition to computation and back again from
computation to intuition, while never releasing his hold on either of the
two, represents in miniature the whole range of operations by which
articulation disciplines and expands the reasoning powers of man. (Personal
Knowledge, 131)

Everyone knows that putting a untrained business major in charge of a
squadron of soldiers would end badly. He might be able skate by until they
got into combat, maybe, but after that they wouldn’t listen to him for long.
But for some reason we think that putting an mba in charge of an engineering
team is a good idea.

"On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order,
and being surprised in ways large and small by their failure, forever." —
Albert Burneko on Wile E. Coyote.

"There is a special providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and
the United States of America." ~ Otto van bismarck

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied"
~ Otto von Bismarck

A good proof is one that makes us wiser. -- Yuri Manin

Keep things in their Gauss given order. -- Gilbert Strang

It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one
informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that
they think it’s their call to make. [in the context of 'as a male, you don't
get a say about toxic masculinity' v/s other 'viewpoints' ]
~ medium article link

"Feeding two birds with one scone"
Peta recommended version of "killing two birds with one stone"

the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur
that had been broken and then healed ~ Margaret Mead

The mistake of many adults is confusing serious with solemn.

I hate greek drama. You know, where everything happens off-stage.
~Downton abbey, s02e01

you have to speculate to accumulate

It's so reassuring to see the future unfurl, as long as you remember
that it bears no resemblance to the past.

Sybil, vulgarity is no substitute for wit. ~ Violet, Downton Abbey

"Why dwell on that now?" "Because I want to feel the pleasure of telling you I
told you so".

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”

'The history of transistors is the history of solving Schrödinger's equation in various materials.' -- Leon Lederman

tradition that contested poems would be thrown into a pool. The better poems
would float. Now you know why you shouldn't write dense prose. ~ History of india podcast

children cried with hunger. Women plaited their braids without flowers. ~ History of india podcast.

"There is a spooky quality about the ability of mathematicians to get there
ahead of physicists. It's as if when Neil Armstrong first landed on the moon
he found in the lunar dust the footsteps of Jules Verne" - Steven Weinberg on
old math being applied in physics

You can try; trying is the first step of failure ~ GM Ben finegold on mating sequences.

Some folks prefer the carrot, I the stick. So I will use my considerable
expertise to stick it to you.

"Machine learning is like money laundering for bias"

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.” - H.L. Mencken

David Marquet's credos from "Turn The Ship Around!". Don't ask "Are we
ready?"; instead, ask "How ready are we?". Everything needs to be phrased so
as to invite people to express the knowledge they have, rather than demanding
what amounts to a declaration of
tribal identity.

You can't just go around recognizing what people don't understand. That's
what got Socrates killed. You've gotta make them understand what they don't
understand without making them want to kill you. That's what makes a great
teacher / leader / etc.

'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.' - Adorno.

Policies are nice but at the end of the day we need folks to set an example
(rather than being made an example of)

“The math students dropped out because they could not understand anything. Of
course, I didn’t understand anything either, but non-math students have a
different standard of what it means to understand something,” Huh said. “I
did understand some of the simple examples he showed in classes, and that was
good enough for me.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-path-less-taken-to-the-peak-of-the-math-world-20170627/

"you're such a dick!".
"I'm moby goddamn dick, and you're swimming in my water".

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought
the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the
earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your
view is wronger than both of them put together.

"Ethereum has said they're moving from Proof of Work to Stake; I'm not
surprised, given the Ethereum developers seem to abhor Work in all of its
forms, including making progress on Ethereum itself"

The man is nothing, the work is everything. ~ Napoleon
L’homme c’est rien–l’oeuvre c’est tout