#computing
40 quotes
“I'm afraid I don't understand the method of characteristics,”
“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. Suggesting to Claude Shannon a name for his new uncertainty function, as quoted in Scientific American Vol. 225 No. 3, (1971), p. 180.”
“John von Neumann (1903”
“When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system. As quoted in John von Neumann, 1903”
“It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way… Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe. As quoted in "The Mathematician" in The World of Mathematics (1956), by James Roy Newman”
“Method in the Physical Sciences”
“The Role of Mathematics in the Sciences and in Society”
“Unsolved Problems in Mathematics”
“Can we survive Technology?”
“inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. At the inception the style is usually classical; when it shows signs of becoming baroque, then the danger signal is up. It would be easy to give examples, to trace specific evolutions into the baroque and the very high baroque... Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.”
“I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy. As appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chips , a Department of the Navy information technology magazine”
“I've always been more interested in the future than in the past . As quoted in The Reader's Digest (October 1994), p. 185”
“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs. As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X”
“There's something you learn in your first boot”
“I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?”
“Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.”
“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?" On being the oldest active”
“At present , we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with the computers will change that. As quoted in the U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine”
“From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer , we said it had bugs in it. On the removal of a 2”
“We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data”
“Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory”
“The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely. Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954).”
“Science is a differential equation . Religion is a boundary condition . Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954); reprinted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513.”
“The sentence in bold appears on the latest British £50 bank note featuring Alan Turing which was released on 23 June 2021 on what would have been his 109th birthday.”
“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms. 'The Mechanical Brain. Answer Found to 300 Year Old Problem' The Times newspaper, 11 June 1949 page 4 column 5.”
“Intelligent Machinery.”
“Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing,”
“Proposed Electronic Calculator”
“We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions.”
“Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,”
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform”
“A large, coarse”
“Difference and Analytical Engines”
“[...] engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity. As quoted by Rosen, Kenneth H. (2013). Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications , McGraw”
“I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar. As quoted in Toole, Betty Alexandra (1998), Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, Strawberry Press, ISBN 0912647183 . p. 99”
“In a letter to Andrew Crosse , as quoted in Eugen Kölbing 's Englische Studien, Volume 19 (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland,”
“When I behold the scientific and so”
“Perhaps you have felt already, from the tone of my letter, that I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science , and science is religion. In that deeply”
“Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics . In a letter to Andrew Crosse , as quoted in Eugen Kölbing 's Englische Studien, Volume 19 (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 156.”
“We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard”