Brian Hayes Quotes

I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of <math>pi</math> - a task that is now a mere warm-up exercise for computer software. I cannot help wandering which of my labors will appear equally quaint and pathetic to some future reader who ransacks libraries for old volumes like this one.

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

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

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

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.

The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them.

After a few more centuries, perhaps the poorest billion will even be able to afford the $10.00 buffet.

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

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

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.

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

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

The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked.

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."