Top 15 Brian Hayes Quotes

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge.

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