Blog Posts

Addison (Church’s son in-law) to Church: Dear Professor Church, Russell had the iota operator, Hilbert had the epsilon operator. Why did you choose lambda for your operator? Church to Addison: eeny, meeny, miny, moe

When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite. — William Blake

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature. —Michael Faraday

So one should be unafraid to ask “stupid” questions, challenging conventional wisdom on a subject; the answers to these questions will occasionally lead to a surprising conclusion, but more often will simply tell you why the conventional wisdom is there in the first place, which is well worth knowing. — Terry Tao

Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced… the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously… this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work… — André Weil, “The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician”

Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important and instructive phase of the work… A good teacher should understand and impress on his students the view that no problem whatever is completely exhausted. One of the first and foremost duties of the teacher is not to give his students the impression that mathematical problems have little connection with each other, and no connection at all with anything else. ... Read more …

“To the teacher of programming, even more, I say: identify the paradigms you use, as fully as you can, then teach them explicitly. They will serve your students when Fortran has replaced Latin and Sanskrit as the archetypal dead language.” — Robert W. Floyd (from: The Paradigms of Programming)

Computer science is a science of abstraction—creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. — Alfred V. Aho

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. — Werner Heisenberg

Regardless of your scientific theory, scientism destroys human knowledge and makes you stupid. Regardless of your political ideology, political scientism destroys human life and makes you dangerous. — Robin Koerner