Excerpt from GENE515
This partly answers a question asked of me when I was 21 years old, by my doctoral thesis advisor Oliver G. Selfridge. When I say "Man" I am echoing and older text, and not excluding Woman.
Excerpt from GENE515What is Man, that he may know Number? What is Number that it may be known by Man ( Read more... )
Excerpt from GENE515What is Man, that he may know Number? What is Number that it may be known by Man ( Read more... )
Physicists' God-talk by Don Batten"... Some well-known physicists in recent times have used language which, to many Christians, sounds as if these men have some sort of Christian faith, or are leaning in that direction. Some Christian people have thus been encouraged. Some writers in Christian magazines have encouraged this belief that the physicists are getting 'closer to God', even claiming that what they say authenticates the Bible. [For example, Hugh Ross, 'Cosmology's Holy Grail', Christianity Today, December 12, 1994, pp. 24-7 ( ... )
Reply
Ogden Nash (Invocation)
Senator Smoot is an institute
Not to be bribed with pelf;
He guards our homes from erotic tomes
By reading them all himself.
Smite, Smoot, smite for Ut.,
They're smuggling smut from Balt. to Butte!
Strongest and sternest
Of your s_x
Scatter the scoundrels
From Can. to Mex!
Reply
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei
Reply
Galileo was no idiot.
Only an idiot could believe
that science requires martyrdom --
that may be necessary in religion,
but in time
a scientific result
will establish itself.
-- David Hilbert, (1862-1943) In H. Eves, Mathematical Circles Squared, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1971.
Reply
Religion will not reign its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
Reply
"Mathematics gets its semblance of reality by never saying what it is talking about."
-- Bertrand Russell
coauthor with Whitehead of Principia Mathematica.
Reply
"It is more important
that a proposition be interesting
than that it be true.
This statement is almost a tautology.
For the energy of operation of a proposition
in an occasion of experience is its interest
and is its importance.
But of course a true proposition
is more apt to be interesting
than a false one."
-- Alfred North Whitehead, W.H. Auden and L. Kronenberger The Viking Book of Aphorisms, New York: Viking Press, 1966.
Reply
It is sad to find him belaboring the science community for its united opposition to ignorant creationists who want teachers and textbooks to give equal time to crank arguments that have advanced not a step beyond the flyblown rhetoric of Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
-- Martin Gardner
Reply
Nobody since Newton
has been able to use
geometrical methods
to the same extent
for the like purposes;
and as we read the Principia
we feel as when we are
in an ancient armoury
where the weapons are
of gigantic size;
and as we look at them
we marvel
what manner of man
he was
who could use
as a weapon
what we
can scarcely lift
as a burden.
-- William Whewell [see below]
in E. N. Da C. Andrade "Isaac Newton"
in J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
====
William Whewell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaWilliam Whewell (May 24, 1794 - March 6, 1866) was a scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, natural theologian and historian of science. His surname is pronounced "Hughell ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Reply
If we evolved
a race of Isaac Newtons,
that would not
be progress.
For the price
Newton had to pay
for being a supreme intellect
was that he was incapable
of friendship, love, fatherhood,
and many other
desirable things.
As a man he was a failure;
as a monster he was superb.
-- Aldous Huxley, Interview with J. W. N. Sullivan,
Contemporary Mind, London, 1934.
Reply
I recognize the lion by his paw.
-- Jacques Bernoulli, Jacques (1654-1705)
[After reading an anonymous solution to a problem
that he realized was Newton's solution.]
in G. Simmons, Calculus Gems, New York: McGraw Hill, 1992, p. 136.
Man with a Golden Paw
"It is not unthinkable that the paw, or claw, may be an obscure reference to some Latin phrase which, in this context, would have the force of a motto. The motto might be
'ex ungue leonem' (to recognize 'the lion by its paw'), a synechoche employed by Classical writers, for example Plutarch and Lucian, to refer - by metonymy - to a painter's brushwork or signature, or 'hand' in sculpture, which immediately identifies the work of a particular master. This interpretation of the paw would, of course, be in keeping with the suggestion that it represents a professional attribute."
Reply
"Structures are the weapons of the mathematician."
-- Bourbaki.
Reply
Leave a comment