Quotations

• I am proud to be a teacher. Teaching is an ephemeral subject. It is like playing the violin. The piece is over, and it's gone. The student is taught, and the teaching is gone. [Paul Halmos]
• I found that one of the most striking things distinguishing mathematicians from computer scientists was their strong geometric reasoning and reasoning about infinity. The things that were common to both computer science and mathematics were primarily things like the use of abstractions and the manipulation of formulas. The main thing that was prominent in computer science that wasn't in mathematics was an emphasis on the state of a process as it changes, where it changes in time in a discrete way. In computer science when you say n is replaced by n+1, the old value disappears and the new value takes over. We know how to think about an algorithm that is half-way executed; it has a state consisting of the current values of all the variables, and the state also specifies what rule to apply next. In order to formulate this for most mathematicians,it requires putting subscripts on everything. [Donald Knuth]
• Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. [Robert Heinlein, in his S.F. novel Time Enough for Love (1973)]