Brian Hayes Quotes

I'm not a mathematician, but I've been hanging around with some of them long enough to know how the game is played.

The fact is, winding and dusting and fixing somebody else's clock is boring.

Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance.

If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.

By the way, the = notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He choose two parallel lines as a symbol of equality " because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle."

The whirling gears of progress have put the gear makers out of work.

The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it.

In 1948 John Archibald Wheeler, in a telephone conversation with his student Richard Feynman, proposed the delightful hypothesis that there is just one electron in the universe.

The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell.

Empires come and go; so do ideologies and even religions, but war marches on through it all.

A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace.

A big advantage of the serial-number approach to identity is that things stay the same even as they change.

It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots.

How can we measure the effects if we can't even count the dead to the nearest million?

I'm not a gambling person, but I've been around long enough and I know how to play it.