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

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.

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

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.