The aim of theory really is, to a great extent, that of systematically organizing past experience in such a way that the next generation, our students and their students and so on, will be able to absorb the essential aspects in as painless a way as possible, and this is the only way in which you can go on cumulatively building up any kind of scientific activity without eventually coming to a dead end.
The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story - Donald Knuth ¹³
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte - Provincial letters, Blaise Pascal ʳ
Write down the type. The program will write itself. - ppk
About getting into grad school: ³
In my experience, the most important character trait in research is not intelligence, but self-discipline. Brilliance helps, but it's not necessary. Success in grad school is 20% luck, 20% intelligence and 50% hard work. I never figured out what the remaining 10% is.
If you only want to go to a top grad school, then you're going to grad school for the wrong reason, and the odds of you getting in are low. You should go to grad school because you want to do research, and you don't need to go to a "top" school for that.
There is no royal road to geometry.
μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν.
Non est regia ad Geometriam via.
'Engage with other users of the tools you use in the form of user groups, mailing lists, web forums, etc. Learn foundational principles instead of answers to immediate questions.' - Michael T. Richter
A quote by Jules Henri Poincaré (about drawing inferences from data, I suppose) ¹⁰:
Science is built up with fact as a house is with stone. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
on fait la science avec des faits comme une maison avec des pierres; mais une accumulation de faits n'est pas plus une science qu'un tas de pierres n'est une maison.
(We do science with the facts like a house (is made) with stones; but a collection of facts is no more science than a pile of stones is a house.)
He who accepts statistics indiscriminately
will often be duped unnecessarily.
But he who distrusts statistics indiscriminately
will often be ignorant unnecessarily
Uncertain knowledge + Knowledge of the amount of uncertainty in it = Usable knowledge
Program testing can at best show the presence of errors, but never their absence.. ¹²
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. - E. Dijkstra ¹²
Whether the thesis is theoretical or an implemented solution, students need to be guided to understand who will consume their contribution if they are successful. - from Advising Students for Success by Jeffrey D. Ullman in ACM Viewpoints
A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures. - Edgar Dijkstra (from EWD 1239) ʳ
Do only what only you can do. - Dijkstra when advising someone about choosing a research topic ʳ
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. - Edsger W. Dijkstra ʳ
Golden rule for Coq Programming: If you start to feel lots of pain in your proofs, you are likely doing it wrong! - ejgallego (Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias) on StackOverflowʳ
Critique is the way you pay respect to someone's work. Whole purpose of research is critique. Critique helps the researcher make their work better - Dr. Meena Pillai
From Handbook of history of logic - Volume 2:
In chapter II, 51 of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes describes a curious case presented to Sancho Panza as the governor of the island Barataria. There was a river, a bridge, a gallows - and a law. According to the law, everyone crossing the bridge must first tell under oath where he is going. If he is truthful, he may pass freely, but if he lies, he will be hanged on the gallows. Now, a man is brought to Sancho after having taken the oath that he was going to be hanged on the gallows. The judges had been unable to solve the case, for if he was hanged, he had spoken the truth and thus should not have been hanged. And if he was not hanged, he lied, and thus should have been hanged.
–
in what sense a person who "swears that he will break his oath" can keep his oath
–
'this sentence is false'
… quality thinking is to approach these ways of doing things these processes scientifically where there is a theory behind why we do them. There is a description of what we do.
Beware of the bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth
I promise I don't care whether or not you have publications when you apply to work with me on a PhD… I do care about whether you are reading the existing literature and experimenting with stuff independently. Those qualities are much more predictive for me than prior publications. ʳ - Jon Sterling
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. The terrible temptation to tweak should be resisted unless the payoff is really noticeable. ʳ
Emanuel Derman, famous quantitative analystʷ, talking about learning functional style of programming (Mathematica) ˡ:
Getting fluent in any new language takes time and an adjustment of your thinking style, and the more powerful and compact the language, the harder it is to read or write at the beginning.
It's much easier to teach the domain and the tools than it is to teach instinct and curiosity. - From a Jane street video
Usually when you work very very deeply on a problem and find an answer, that's only half the battle. The other half is presenting what you learned to other people. who haven't spent as long in the weeds as you.
When I was a child, I was told that Santa Claus came in through the chimney, and that computers were programmed in binary code. Since then, I have learned that programming is better done in higher-level languages, more abstract and more expressive. I have also learned that programmers sometimes make errors, and therefore that advanced programming languages should not only convey the programmer’s thoughts, but also allow the automatic checking for certain inconsistencies in programs
"Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen"
("We must know, we will know")
Contradicted by Gödel at the same congress the day before (arithmetic is incomplete) as per Wikipedia.
'There may, indeed, be other applications of the system than its use as a logic.' - Alonzo Church about lambda calculus
"God created the integers, all else is the work of man." - Leopold Kronecker
'One common trait among FPGA vendor tools is that they range from horribly painful to painfully horrible.' - Retrocomputing with Clash: Haskell for FPGA Hardware Design - Gergő Érdi
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. ⁶
Apparently posted by Google on Twitter on Engineer's day 2020 (I guess the original message had an opening bracket missing). The plots of the equations result in a heart shape:
After some calculation, we've found the best way to show our love for engineers.
Search for:
sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)0.01, sqrt(6-x2), -sqrt(6-x2) from -4.5 to 4.5
Happy
mc² = E
pv/RT = n (amount of substance. From ideal gas equation)
9.8 ms⁻² = g (acceleration due to gravity on earth)
√(-1) = i (imaginary number)
m/M = n (number of moles. m is mass, M is molar mass)
(1/2)mv² = E (kinetic energy)
mgh = E (gravitational potential energy)
√(Area of a circle)/π = r (radius of a circle)
ut + (1/2)at² = s (distance travelled)
day
Badacz nieskończoności
Translation from Polish: 'Researcher of infinity' or 'Explorer of the infinite'.
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. ¹¹
Programmers confuse Christmas and Halloween, because Oct31 == Dec25. ¹¹
About working on multiple projects or threads/lines of work at once:
You cannot empty your stack. Though some people manage to empty their mailbox. I don't how they do it.
Th₃E₄ CH₃EmIC₂Al₂ Ca₃P₄Er
ON₂Ce₂ U₂Po₃N₂ A SH₃INY AF₃Te₂RnO₂ON I₃N₅ Se₄PtEmBEr, S₃Ir₂ P₇ErC₃Y₃
H₆AgErTi, Th₅E₄ P₂H₃YSiCS₄ WHI₂P, WHoSe₃ Mg Ra₃N₂ O₆UTa₂ Ga₂S₃ In
Fr₆O₄NTa CYN₂ThIAS HoUSe₃, WAlKS₄ In SO₂ He Ca₃N₂ USe₃ H₃Er
P₃Ho₃Ne. He CAl₂S₃ UP IV₅AN₃ VON DyCK, AN₂OThEr ScI₃EN₂Ce F₅IENd, ANd
O₃F₆F₂ErS₂Ta₂ SH₂O₂W Th₅E₄ GeNTl₂EmAN₂ H₃IS Pr₂OOF₄ ThAt₄ Mv₁ == Mv₂.
-----
Remarks:
- I couldn't find the element E in Th₅E₄.
- Not sure what Mg is. I guess it's a car.
- 'Calls' is written as 'Cals'.
- 'fiend' looks like 'friend'
- 'offersta', 'outa', etc