Background

Sometimes an interesting expression will make a day, so I decide to take them down.

Contents

“LinuxCNC is user-friendly. It just isn’t promiscuous about which users it’s friendly with.”

​ ——LinuxCNC wiki

“Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.”

​ ——Errett Bishop

“The art of doing mathematics is finding that special case that contains all the germs of generality.”

​ ——David Hilbert

“So far as the theroies of mathmatics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”

——Albert Einstein

“The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.”

——Richard Hamming

“It is my experience that proofs involving matrices can be shortened by 50% if one throws the matrices out.”

——Emil Artin

“To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.”

——Georg Cantor

“Such axioms, together with other unmotivated definitions, serve mathematicians mainly by making it difficult for the uninitiated to master their subject, thereby elevating its authority.”

——Vladimir Arnol’d

“Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.”

——Henri Poincare

(I think it also the art of giving the same thing different names, haha)

“Thermodynamics is the restrictions on the the possible properties of matter that follow from the symmetry properties of the fundamental laws of physics.”

——Herbert B. Callen