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User talk:OGoncho~enwikiquote

Hi,, welcome back to Wikiquote ;-) Here are some useful links:
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Shortly be bold and enjoy!--Aphaia 20:39, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

 * Hi. I have nominated Haunted Apiary, which you started, for deletion. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 07:33, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Jeremy. When you have time, I strongly suggest looking at Sluggy Freelance to see how I chose to format a webcomic's quote page. I believe it to be a better way because I'm afraid webcomics on Wikiquote are new, and nobody is quite sure how to format them best. If you want to discuss it more, feel free to post on my talk page, Talk:El Goonish Shive and/or the Village pump. Television shows have existed for 80 years or so, and still we only managed to settle on a format for them recently: I hope we can do better with web-comics :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 09:03, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Dialogue is easier to format that way.
 * It is easier for readers to look for the quotes' context
 * It is easier for editors to verify, and to fix, quotations.

 * FYI, I'm not Jeremy. That was someone else. The info's useful, though. Thanks. --OGoncho 06:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

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title: User talk:OGoncho~enwikiquote


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Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician, astronomer and physicist.

Quotes

 * But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations.
 * About the proof of Wilson's theorem. Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801) Article 76

 * The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. It has engaged the industry and wisdom of ancient and modern geometers to such an extent that it would be superfluous to discuss the problem at length. … Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.
 * Problema, numeros primos a compositis dignoscendi, hosque in factores suos primos resolvendi, ad gravissima ac utilissima totius arithmeticae pertinere, et geometrarum tum veterum tum recentiorum industriam ac sagacitatem occupavisse, tam notum est, ut de hac re copiose loqui superfluum foret. … [P]raetereaque scientiae dignitas requirere videtur, ut omnia subsidia ad solutionem problematis tam elegantis ac celebris sedulo excolantur.
 * Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801): Article 329

 * The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. But when a person of that sex, that, because of our mores and our prejudices, has to encounter infinitely more obstacles and difficulties than men in familiarizing herself with these thorny research problems, nevertheless succeeds in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating their most obscure parts, she must without doubt have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius.
 * Letter to Sophie Germain (30 April 1807) ([...]; les charmes enchanteurs de cette sublime science ne se décèlent dans toute leur beauté qu'à ceux qui ont le courage de l'approfondir. Mais lorsqu'une personne de ce sexe, qui, par nos meurs [sic] et par nos préjugés, doit rencontrer infiniment plus d'obstacles et de difficultés, que les hommes, à se familiariser avec ces recherches épineuses, sait néanmoins franchir ces entraves et pénétrer ce qu'elles ont de plus caché, il faut sans doute, qu'elle ait le plus noble courage, des talents tout à fait extraordinaires, le génie superieur.)

 * It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. [Wahrlich es ist nicht das Wissen, sondern das Lernen, nicht das Besitzen sondern das Erwerben, nicht das Da-Seyn, sondern das Hinkommen, was den grössten Genuss gewährt.] When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again. The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.
 * Letter to Farkas Bolyai (2 September 1808)

 * In researches in which an infinity of directions of straight lines in space is concerned, it is advantageous to represent these directions by means of those points upon a fixed sphere, which are the end points of the radii drawn parallel to the lines. The centre and the radius of this auxiliary sphere are here quite arbitrary. The radius may be taken equal to unity. This procedure agrees fundamentally with that which is constantly employed in astronomy, where all directions are referred to a fictitious celestial sphere of infinite radius. Spherical trigonometry and certain other theorems, to which the author has added a new one of frequent application, then serve for the solution of the problems which the comparison of the various directions involved can present.
 * "Gauss's Abstract of the Disquisitiones Generales circa Superficies Curvas presented to the Royal Society of Gottingen" (1827) Tr. James Caddall Morehead & Adam Miller Hiltebeitel in General Investigations of Curved Surfaces of 1827 and 1825 (1902)

 * Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.
 * "Gauss's Abstract of the Disquisitiones Generales circa Superficies Curvas presented to the Royal Society of Gottingen" (1827) Tr. James Caddall Morehead & Adam Miller Hiltebeitel in General Investigations of Curved Surfaces of 1827 and 1825 (1902)

 * Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.
 * "Gauss's Abstract of the Disquisitiones Generales circa Superficies Curvas presented to the Royal Society of Gottingen" (1827) Tr. James Caddall Morehead & Adam Miller Hiltebeitel in General Investigations of Curved Surfaces of 1827 and 1825 (1902)

 * I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where ½ proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.
 * In a letter to Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (14 May 1826), defending Chevalier d'Angos against presumption of guilt (by Johann Franz Encke and others), of having falsely claimed to have discovered a comet in 1784; as quoted in Calculus Gems  (1992) by George F. Simmons

 * We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
 * Letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1830)

 * To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work … coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
 * Letter to Farkas Bolyai, on his son János Bolyai's 1832 publishings on non-Euclidean geometry.

 * I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance... The writer is a very young Austrian officer, the son of one of my early friends, with whom I often discussed the subject in 1798, although my ideas were at that time far removed from the development and maturity which they have received through the original reflections of this young man. I consider the young geometer J. Bolyai a genius of the first rank.
 * Letter to Gerling (1832)

 * Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.
 * As quoted in Gauss zum Gedächtniss (1856) by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen; Variants: Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank. Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. [Die Mathematik ist die Königin der Wissenschaften und die Zahlentheorie ist die Königin der Mathematik.]

 * The function just found cannot, it is true, express rigorously the probabilities of the errors: for since the possible errors are in all cases confined within certain limits, the probability of errors exceeding those limits ought always to be zero, while our formula always gives some value. However, this defect, which every analytical function must, from its nature, labor under, is of no importance in practice, because the value of our function decreases so rapidly... that it can safely be considered as vanishing. Besides, the nature of the subject never admits of assigning with absolute rigor the limits of error.
 * Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (1857)

 * There is in this world a joy of the intellect, which finds satisfaction in science, and a joy of the heart, which manifests itself above all in the aid men give one another against the troubles and trials of life. But for the Supreme Being to have created existences, and stationed them in various spheres in order to taste these joys for some 80 or 90 years — that were surely a miserable plan.... Whether the soul were to live for 80 years or for 80 million years, if it were doomed in the end to perish, such an existence would only be a respite. In the end it would drop out of being. We are thus impelled to the conclusion to which so many things point, although they do not amount to a coercive scientific proof, that besides this material world there exists another purely spiritual order of things, with activities as various, as the present, and that this world of spirit we shall one day inherit.
 * As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911."Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century", Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 48-49

 * "It is beyond doubt that the happiness which love can bestow on its chosen souls is the highest that can fall to mortal's lot. But when I imagine myself in the place of the man who, after twenty happy years, now in one moment loses his all, I am moved almost to say that he is the wretchedest of mortals, and that it is better never to have known such happy days. So it is on this miserable earth: 'the purest joy finds its grave in the abyss of time'. What are we without the hope of a better future?
 * As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911."Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century", Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 44-45

 * May the dream which we call life be for you a happy dream, a foretaste of that true life which we shall inherit in our real home, when the awakened spirit shall labour no longer under the grievous bondage of the flesh, the fetters of space, the whips of earthly pain, and the sting of our paltry needs and desires. Let us carry our burdens to the end, stoutly and uncomplainingly, never losing sight of that higher goal. Glad then shall we be to lay down our weary lives, and to see the dropping of the curtain."
 * As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911."Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century", Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 46

 * Believe me,... the bitterness of life, or at least of mine, which runs through it like a strand of red, and becomes less and less endurable as I grow older, is not compensated in the hundredth part by the joy of life. I will freely admit that these burdens, which to me have been so grievous, would have been lighter to many another; but our temperament is part of ourselves, given to us by the Creator with our very existence, and we have very little power to change it. I find, on the other hand, in this very consciousness of the vanity of life, which nearly all men must confess to as they draw near the end, my strongest assurance of the approach of a more beautiful metamorphosis. In this, my dear friend, let us find comfort, and endeavour to call up calmness to bear life out to the end.
 * As quoted in Kneller, Karl Alois, Kettle, Thomas Michael, 1911."Christianity and the leaders of modern science; a contribution to the history of culture in the nineteenth century", Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 44-45

 * The perturbations which the motions of planets suffer from the influence of other planets, are so small and so slow that they only become sensible after a long interval of time; within a shorter time, or even within one or several revolutions, according to circumstances, the motion would differ so little from motion exactly described, according to the laws of Kepler, in a perfect ellipse, that observations cannot show the difference. As long as this is true, it not be worth while to undertake prematurely the computation of the perturbations, but it will be sufficient to adapt to the observations what we may call an osculating conic section: but, afterwards, when the planet has been observed for a longer time, the effect of the perturbations will show itself in such a manner, that it will no longer be possible to satisfy exactly all the observations by a purely elliptic motion; then, accordingly, a complete and permanent agreement cannot be obtained, unless the perturbations are properly connected with the elliptic motion.
 * Theoria motus corporum coelestium... (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (1857)

 * The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.
 * As quoted by Robert Chambers, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Apple," The Book of Days (1832) Vol. 2, p. 757.

 * The principle that the sum of the squares of the differences between the observed and computed quantities must be a minimum may, in the following manner, be considered independently of the calculus of probabilities. When the number of unknown quantities is equal to the number of the observed quantities depending on them, the former may be so determined as exactly to satisfy the latter. But when the number of the former is less than that of the latter, an absolutely exact agreement cannot be obtained, unless the observations possess absolute accuracy. In this case care must be taken to establish the best possible agreement, or to diminish as far as practicable the differences. This idea, however, from its nature, involves something vague. For, although a system of values for the unknown quantities which makes all the differences respectively less than another system, is without doubt to be preferred to the latter, still the choice between two systems, one of which presents a better agreement in some observations, the other in others, is left in a measure to our judgment, and innumerable different principles can be proposed by which the former condition is satisfied. Denoting the differences between observation and calculation by A, A’, A’’, etc., the first condition will be satisfied not only if AA + A’ A’ + A’’ A’’ + etc., is a minimum (which is our principle) but also if A4 + A’4 + A’’4 + etc., or A6 + A’6 + A’’6 + etc., or in general, if the sum of any of the powers with an even exponent becomes a minimum. But of all these principles ours is the most simple; by the others we should be led into the most complicated calculations.
 * Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections (1857)

 * It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation. So there are mere philologists, mere jurists, mere soldiers, mere merchants, etc. To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings.
 * Gauss-Schumacher Briefwechsel (1862)

 * I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
 * The Mind and the Eye (1954) by A. Arber

 * If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
 * The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

 * I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.
 * A reply to Olbers' 1816 attempt to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

 * There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.
 * As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

 * Finally, a few days ago, it has been achieved - but not by my cumbersome search, rather through God’s good grace, I am tempted to say. As the lightning strikes the riddle was solved; I myself would be unable to point to a guiding thread between what I knew before, what I had used in my last attempts, and what made it work.
 * In a letter to Wilhelm Olbers (September 3, 1805). Translation from The Shaping of Arithmetic after C.F. Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (2007) by Catherine Goldstein, Norbert Schappacher, Joachim Schwermer (Eds.) p. 507.

 * I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I. I must say that so often in earlier times when I saw people of the lower classes, simple manual laborers who could believe so rightly with their hearts, I always envied them, and now tell me how does one begin this?
 * A reply to 's on his religious views as quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.

 * I scarcely believe that in psychology data are present which can be mathematically evaluated. But one cannot know this with certainty, without having made the experiment. God alone is in possession of the mathematical bases of psychic phenomena.
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 306

 * You say that faith is a gift; this is perhaps the most correct thing that can be said about it.
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 305.

 * Yes! The world would be nonsense, the whole creation an absurdity without immortality.
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 357

 * All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.
 * March 14, 1824. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 360

 * Even though much error and hypocrisy may often be mixed in such pietistic tendencies, nevertheless I recognize with all my heart the business of a missionary as a highly honorable one in so far as it leads to civilization the still semisavage part of earth s inhabitants. May my son try it for several years.
 * Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 359

 * One is forced to the view, for which there is so much evidence even though without rigorous scientific basis, that besides this material world another, second, purely spiritual world order exists, with just as many diversities as that in which we live-—we are to participate in it.
 * Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 349

 * One day he said: For the soul there is a satisfaction of a higher type; the material is not at all necessary. Whether I apply mathematics to a couple of clods of dirt, which we call planets, or to purely arithmetical problems, it's just the same; the latter have only a higher charm for me.
 * Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 348

 * A great part of its theories derives an additional charm from the peculiarity that important propositions, with the impress of simplicity on them, are often easily discovered by induction, and yet are of so profound a character that we cannot find the demonstrations till after many vain attempts; and even then, when we do succeed, it is often by some tedious and artificial process, while the simple methods may long remain concealed.
 * On higher arithmetic. Mathematical Circles Adieu (1977) by Howard W. Eves

 * I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect. . . Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics.
 * As quoted in Solid Shape (1990) by Jan J. Koenderink

 * You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
 * As quoted in Calculus Gems (1992) by George F. Simmons

 * In general the position as regards all such new calculi is this - That one cannot accomplish by them anything that could not be accomplished without them. However, the advantage is, that, provided such a calculus corresponds to the inmost nature of frequent needs, anyone who masters it thoroughly is able - without the unconscious inspiration of genius which no one can command - to solve the respective problems, yea to solve them mechanically in complicated cases in which, without such aid, even genius becomes powerless. Such is the case with the invention of general algebra, with the differential calculus, and in a more limited region with Lagrange's calculus of variations, with my calculus of congruences, and with Mobius's calculus. Such conceptions unite, as it were, into an organic whole countless problems which otherwise would remain isolated and require for their separate solution more or less application of inventive genius.
 * As quoted in Gauss, Werke, Bd. 8, page 298
 * As quoted in Memorabilia Mathematica (or The Philomath's Quotation-Book) (1914) by Robert Edouard Moritz, quotation #1215
 * As quoted in The First Systems of Weighted Differential and Integral Calculus (1980) by Jane Grossman, Michael Grossman, and Robert Katz, page ii

 * The austere sides of life, at least of mine, which move through it like a red thread, and which one faces more and more defenselessly in old age, are not balanced to the hundredth part by the pleasurable. I will gladly admit that the same fates which have been so hard for me to bear, and still are, would have been much easier for many another person, but the mental constitution belongs to our ego, which the Creator of our existence has given us, and we can change little in it.
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 360

 * I am almost amazed that you consider a professional philosopher capable of no confusion in concepts and definitions. Such things are nowhere more at home than among philosophers who are not mathematicians, and Wolff was no mathematician, even though he made cheap compen- diums. Look around among the philosophers of today, among Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Esenbeck, and their like; doesn t your hair stand on end at their definitions? Read in the history of ancient philosophy what kinds of definitions the men of that day, Plato and others, gave (I except Aristotle). But even in Kant it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic theorems is such a one that either peters out in a triviality or is false.
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 362

 * One cannot reduce to concepts the distinction between two systems of three straight lines each (directed lines, of which the one system points forward, upward to the right, the other forward, upward to the left) but one can only demonstrate by holding to actually present spatial things. Two minds cannot reach agreement about it unless their views connect up with one and the same system present in the real world
 * In a letter to Gerling on June 23, 1846. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 364

 * Dark are the paths which a higher hand allows us to traverse here... let us hold fast to the faith that a finer, more sublime solution of the enigmas of earthly life will be present, will become part of us.
 * In his letter to Schumacher on February 9, 1823. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

 * In such apparent accidents which finally produce such a decisive influence on one s whole life, one is inclined to recognize the tools of a higher hand. The great enigma of life never becomes clear to us here below.
 * In a letter dated April 25, 1825. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

 * If the object of all human investigation were but to produce in cognition a reflection of the world as it exists, of what value would be all its labor and pains, which could result only in vain repetition, in an imitation within the soul of that which exists without it?
 * As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 365

 * The study of Euler's works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics and nothing else can replace it.
 * As quoted by Louise Grinstein, Sally I. Lipsey, Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education (2001) p. 235.

 * That this subject [of ] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If for instance, +1, -1, √-1 had been called direct, inverse, and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary (or even impossible) such an obscurity would have been out of question.
 * In Theoria residiorum biquadraticorum, Commentatio secunda; Werke, Bd. 2 (Goettingen, 1863), p.177. As quoted by Robert Edouard Moritz in Memorabilia mathematica: the philomath's quotation book (1914) p. 282.

 * Gauss's aim was always to give his investigations the form of perfect works of art. He would not rest sooner and never gave a piece of work to the public until he had given it the perfection of form he desired for it. A good building should not show its scaffolding when completed, he used to say. In his demonstrations he used almost entirely the synthetic method, which he had come to prize through his studies of Archimedes and Newton. It is distinguished from the analytic method by its brevity and comprehensiveness. But the road leading to the discovery remains veiled; and indeed it often seems that Gauss frequently and intentionally turned aside from the road that led to mere instruction.
 * as quoted by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen in his 1856 Carl Friedrich Gauss: A Memorial (pg67 of Helen Worthington Gauss's 1966 English translation)
 * [ Abraham Gotthelf Kästner is] the best mathematician among poets and the best poet among mathematicians
 * quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 26: Non-Euclidean Geometries, p. 444. Gauss meant it as a sarcastic remark, after he presented his construction of the 17-gon, and Kästner failed to notice its significance.
 * Pauca sed matura ["few, but ripe"]
 * Gauss's motto.
 * Procreare jucundum, sed parturire molestum ["to beget is pleasant, but to give birth is painful"]
 * Another of Gauss's motto.
 * Bei Gegenstdnden mit denen ich mich noch nicht lange beschaftigt habe, bin ich gegen meine eigenen Ansichten, zumal wenn sie einem Laplace widersprechen, misstrauisch und nehme gern die von anderen entgegen. ["I am suspicious of my own views on subjects with which I have not long occupied myself, and gladly accept those of others, especially when my views contradict one of Laplace."]
 * Letter to Bessel (1826), quoted in Dunnington, G. Waldo. "Gauss, His Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, and His Contemporaries in the Institut de France." National Mathematics Magazine 9.7 (1935): 187-192.

Quotes about Gauss

 * Some of the discoveries of Abel and Jacobi were anticipated by Gauss. In the Disquisitiones Arithmeticæ he observed that the principles which he used in the division of the circle were applicable to many other functions, besides the circular, and particularly to the transcendents dependent on the integral $$\displaystyle \int \frac{\,dx}{\sqrt{1-x^4}}$$. From this Jacobi concluded that Gauss had thirty years earlier considered the nature and properties of elliptic functions and had discovered their double periodicity. The papers in the collected works of Gauss confirm this conclusion.
 * Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics (1893)

 * Not only could nobody but Gauss have produced it, but it would never have occurred to anyone but Gauss that such a formula was possible.
 * Albert Einstein, on the formula developed by Gauss for finding the date of Passover, as quoted in The Calculated Confusion of Calendars (1976) by W. A. Schocken

 * There is no doubt... that mathematicians are generally overzealous about conciseness, and in their passion for brevity indulge in symbols even where these seem no better than a familiar English word or phrase. A faulty judgement has caused mathematicians to equate elegance and conciseness at the cost of intelligibility. Gauss himself wrote elegant, but highly compact, carefully polished papers with no hint of the motivation, meaning, or details of the steps. When criticized, he said that no architect leaves the scaffolding after completing the building. But the fact is that even excellent mathematicians found the reading of Gauss's papers very difficult, and the same is true of many other mathematicians.
 * Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 5: Numbers Known and Unknown, pp. 58-59; for the original of the building quote, see Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen's 1856 memorial (quoted above)

But history shows that the human mind is fertile, ingenious, and creative beyond all possible anticipations. ...even the richest vein of thought is ultimately exhausted, and then, indeed, a period of stagnation may ensue. Inevitably, however, there arise new conceptions and new periods of feverish and rewarding research. Euler and his contemporaries failed to reckon with history. ... The man who was to change the course of mathematics was but six years old when Euler and D'Alembert died in 1783... '''Gauss is commonly ranked with Archimedes and Newton. ...all three of these men were as much devoted to physical research as to mathematics.'''
 * Toward the ends of their lives, Euler, D'Alembert, and Lagrange agreed that the realm of mathematical ideas had been practically exhausted and that no new great minds were appearing on the mathematical horizons. Of course, these men had grown old and their vision was already dimmed, for Laplace, Legendre, and Fourier were in young manhood. In one respect, however, these elder statesmen were correct... their immediate successors continued to explore and polish the very same ideas which the mid-eighteenth century had pursued.
 * Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 26: Non-Euclidean Geometries, pp. 443-445.
 * On demandait à Laplace quel était selon lui le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne. C'est Pfaff, répondit-il. - Je croyais, reprit l'interlocuteur, que Gauss lui était supérieur. - Mais, s'écria Laplace, vous me demandez quel est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne, et Gauss est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Europe.
 * They asked Laplace who, in his opinion, was the greatest mathematician of Germany. "It's Pfaff," he answered. - "I thought," the questioner replied, "that Gauss was superior to him." - "But," exclaimed Laplace, "you're asking me who is the greatest mathematician of Germany, and Gauss is the greatest mathematician of Europe."
 * Quoted in Nouvelle Biographie Générale, volume 19, page 686.
 * also quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Physical World (1959) Ch. 26: Non-Euclidean Geometries, p. 444.

 * It is to Gauss, to the Magnetic Union, and to magnetic observers in general, that we owe our deliverance from that absurd method of estimating forces by a variable standard which prevailed so long even among men of science. It was Gauss who first based the practical measurement of magnetic force (and therefore of every other force) on those long established principles, which, though they are embodied in every dynamical equation, have been so generally set aside, that these very equations, though correctly given... are usually explained... by assuming, in addition to the variable standard of force, a variable, and therefore illegal, standard of mass.
 * James Clerk Maxwell, "Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics," The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890) Vol.2

 * If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! The theory of the roots of equations seemed hard for centuries within its little world of real numbers, but it suddenly seemed simple once Gauss exposed the larger world of so-called complex numbers. Similarly, music should make more sense once seen through listeners' minds.
 * Marvin Minsky, "Music, Mind, and Meaning" (1981)

 * According to his frequently expressed view, Gauss considered the three dimensions of space as specific peculiarities of the human soul; people, which are unable to comprehend this, he designated in his humorous mood by the name Bœotians. We could imagine ourselves, he said, as beings which are conscious of but two dimensions; higher beings might look at us in a like manner, and continuing jokingly, he said that he had laid aside certain problems which, when in a higher state of being, he hoped to investigate geometrically.
 * Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen in Gauss zum Gedächtniss (1856)

The Music of the Primes (2003)

 * Quotations about some of the work of Gauss from a book about Prime Numbers by Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics at Oxford University

 * Gauss liked to call [number theory] 'the Queen of Mathematics'. For Gauss, the jewels in the crown were the primes, numbers which had fascinated and teased generations of mathematicians.

 * Armed with his prime number tables, Gauss began his quest. As he looked at the proportion of numbers that were prime, he found that when he counted higher and higher a pattern started to emerge. Despite the randomness of these numbers, a stunning regularity seemed to be looming out of the mist.

 * The revelation that the graph appears to climb so smoothly, even though the primes themselves are so unpredictable, is one of the most miraculous in mathematics and represents one of the high points in the story of the primes. On the back page of his book of logarithms, Gauss recorded the discovery of his formula for the number of primes up to N in terms of the logarithm function. Yet despite the importance of the discovery, Gauss told no one what he had found. The most the world heard of his revelation were the cryptic words, 'You have no idea how much poetry there is in a table of logarithms.'

 * Maybe we have become so hung up on looking at the primes from Gauss's and Riemann's perspective that what we are missing is simply a different way to understand these enigmatic numbers. Gauss gave an estimate for the number of primes, Riemann predicted that the guess is at worst the square root of N off its mark, Littlewood showed that you can't do better than this. Maybe there is an alternative viewpoint that no one has found because we have become so culturally attached to the house that Gauss built.

Obituaries

 * MNRAS 16 (1856) 80

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Carl Friedrich Gauss


text:
South American Community of Nations

The Union of South American Nations is an intergovernmental union integrating two existing custom unions Mercosur and the Andean Community of Nations as part of a continuing process of South American integration.

Quotes

 * Step by step CAN and Mercosur will converge becoming the South American Community, but gradually disappearing at the same time. But in spite of the haste there’s no rush, because we could end with an empty declaration. [...] My idea is that in a few months time CAN [Comunidad Andina de Naciones] should be known as South American Community-CAN and Mercosur [Mercado Común del Sur], South American Community MS, so we have time to get in touch with the new initials.
 * Former Argentine president Eduardo Duhalde, president of the Mercosur Representatives Committee.

 * Today we can say that Simón Bolívar's dream, in the 21st century, is called South American Community of Nations. It's not anymore the dream of a hero, it's the reality of an era.
 * Luiz Inácio da Silva, December 3, 2004.

 * The challenges to Latin American democracy will only be solved by the convergence, each time greater, of economic, cultural and political ties that will allow us to redesign the new space of sovereignty in the era of globalization.
 * Luiz Inácio da Silva, December 3, 2004.

 * We are here to make Simón Bolívar's dream real. [...] Sooner, rather than later, we shall have a single currency, a single passport... Sooner, rather than later, we shall have a parliament with directly elected representatives for this new nation that we are creating today.
 * Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, 8 December 2004.

title: South American Community of Nations


text:
User:MementoVivere

MementoVivere has been a Wikipedian since May 28, 2004.

See this user's primary page at the English Wikipedia.

title: User:MementoVivere


text: User talk:68.23.100.240

title: User talk:68.23.100.240


title: User:68.23.100.240


text:
Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams III (26 March 1911 – 25 February 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

 * See also:
 * A Streetcar Named Desire (film)
 * Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (film)

Quotes

 * When I look back at Stairs to the Roof... I see its faults very plainly, as plainly as you may see them, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period of my playwriting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any times, but particularly for these times. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of Benjamin Murphy! You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom.
 * Program notes for a Pasadena Playhouse production of Stairs to the Roof (1947)

 * I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream.
 * After meeting Anna Magnani, as quoted in Tennessee Williams : Rebellious Puritan (1961) by Nancy Marie Patterson Tischler, p. 175

 * Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
 * "I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer," (1977), from New Selected Essays: Where I Live, ed. John S. Bak and John Lahr (New Directions Publishing, 2009)

 * The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.
 * Quoted in "Tennessee Williams" in Profiles (1990) by Kenneth Tynan (first published as a magazine article in February 1956)

 * The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
 * Interview with James Grissom (1982)

 * Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.
 * The Timeless World of Play, an introductory essay to The Rose Tattoo (1951)

 * The future is called "perhaps," which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
 * "The Past, the Present and the Perhaps," introduction to Orpheus Descending (1957)

 * I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.
 * Sweet Bird of Youth, Act 3 (1959)

Stairs to the Roof (1941)

 * A Prayer for the Wild at Heart That Are Kept in Cages
 * This is the subtitle of the play

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

 * In memory everything seems to happen to music.
 * Tom (As Narrator Scene One)

 * Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
 * Tom, as Narrator, in Scene One

 * Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest food without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down… So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function!
 * Amanda, Scene One

 * Mother, when you're disappointed, you get that awful suffering look on your face, like the picture of Jesus' mother in the museum!
 * Laura, Scene Two

 * I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South — barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! — stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room — encouraged by one in-law to visit another — little birdlike women without any nest — eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves?
 * Amanda, Scene Two

 * Why you're not crippled, you just have a little defect — hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it — develop charm — and vivacity — and — charm!
 * Amanda, Scene Two

 * I took that horrible novel back to the library — yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them — BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!
 * Amanda, Scene Three

 * Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!"
 * Tom, Scene Three

 * Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!
 * Tom, Scene Four

 * You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it!
 * Amanda, Scene Five

 * All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.
 * Amanda, Scene Six

 * Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!
 * Tom, Scene Six

 * All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plenty of servants. But man proposes — and woman accepts the proposal! — To vary that old, old saying a little bit — I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company!
 * Amanda, Scene Six

 * Shakespeare probably wrote a poem on that light bill, Mrs. Wingfield.
 * Jim, Scene Seven

 * I believe in the future of television! I wish to be ready to go up right along with it. Therefore I'm planning to get in on the ground floor. In fact I've already made the right connections and all that remains is for the industry itself to get under way! Full steam — Knowledge — Zzzzzp! Money — Zzzzzp! — Power!
 * Jim, Scene Seven

 * I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less — freakish! Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns…
 * Laura, Scene Seven

 * I wish you were my sister. I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're common as — weeds, but — you — well, you're — Blue Roses!
 * Jim, Scene Seven

 * Things have a way of turning out so badly.
 * Amanda, Scene Seven

 * You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!
 * Amanda, Scene Seven

 * Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! — for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura — and so goodbye…
 * Tom, Scene Seven

The Catastrophe of Success (1945)

 * The sort of life which I had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arm still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last. I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed.
 * page 15

Summer and Smoke (1948)

 * Eternity!—Didn't it give you the cold shivers?
 * Alma, Prologue

 * The tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance! You've come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding the other one gone out, the door locked against him and no one to answer the bell!
 * Alma, Scene Eleven

 * You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!
 * Alma, Scene Twelve

The Rose Tattoo (1951)

 * The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
 * Rosa, Act Three, Scene Three

Camino Real (1953)

 * When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
 * Don Quixote in Prologue

 * I know this place. … Here it is on the chart. Look, it says here: "Continue until you come to the square of a walled town which is the end of the Camino Real and the beginning of the Camino Real. Halt there," it says, "and turn back, Traveler, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place...
 * Sancho

 * You said, "They're harmless dreamers and they're loved by the people." — "What," I asked you, "is harmless about a dreamer, and what," I asked you, "is harmless about the love of the people? — Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."

Orpheus Descending (1957)

 * We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
 * Val (Act 2, Scene 1)

Suddenly Last Summer (1958)

 * We saw the Encantadas, but on the Encantadas we saw something Melville hadn't written about.
 * Mrs. Venable, Scene One

 * And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and—swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.
 * Mrs. Venable, Scene One

 * Well, now I've said it, my son was looking for God. I mean for a clear image of Him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I've seen Him!—and he meant God . ..
 * Mrs. Venable, Scene One

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)

 * We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
 * Christopher
 * All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Quotes about Williams

 * There is one writer who has let language emerge as action recently: Tennessee Williams, a playwright and a poet, has ranged from the blue piano and the Mexican woman intoning, "Flores. Flores. Flores para los muertos. Flores. Flores...." to the streaming soliloquies of danger and the abrupt shifts of seduction and violence, in all of which the inner action and the outer are equilibrated by means of language. Sometimes false, often hypnotic and inescapable, these speeches extend the action of his plays, giving them a density, setting up a world, which is too many times absent from the theater.
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

Misattributed

 * Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.
 * Actually by the Chinese philosopher, educator and popular lecturer Dr. Tehyi Hsieh, Chinese epigrams inside out, and proverbs, 1948.

 * Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it … Success is shy — it won't come out while you're watching.
 * No known citation to Williams. Attributed in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations), 2005, MP Singh, Lotus Press.
 * The full quote is captured in a letter Tennessee wrote to Donald Windham and can be found on pages 57 and 58 of Tennessee WIlliams' Letters to Donald Windham. The quote is not misattributed.

title: Tennessee Williams


text:
Talk:Ed Wood

Note: For the sake of clarity, I have made no attempt to portray Bela Lugosi's accent (done superbly by actor Martin Landau) in any of the quotes. In the film, the accent adds humor to some otherwise-mundane quotes, but this doesn't transfer well onto the written page. --RPickman 00:52, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Ed Wood


text:
Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz composer, pianist, and band leader. Although a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, in the opinion of Gunther Schuller and Barry Kernfeld, "the most significant composer of the genre", Ellington himself embraced the phrase "beyond category", considering it a liberating principle, and referring to his music as part of the more general category of American Music.

1932–1960

 * It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).
 * Song title (1932).

 * I think of music sometimes in terms of color [...] and [in a furnace] I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow.
 * [Sights enabling musical inspiration] The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician [...] Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique.
 * From an interview with Richard O. Boyer, as cited in "The Hot Bach - I", The New Yorker (June 16, 1944; print edition: June 24, 1944)

 * As Bach says [...] if you ain't got a left hand, you ain't worth a hoot in hell.
 * [Expressing a liking for trains] Folks can't rush you until you get off.
 * You can't write music right [...] until you know how the man that'll play it plays poker.
 * [Y]ou've got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best—certain entrances and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he'll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them.
 * I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same. [...] I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on a trombone and they are not the same either.
 * My band is my instrument more than the piano.
 * From an interview with Richard O. Boyer, as cited in "The Hot Bach - II", The New Yorker (July 1, 1944), p. 26, 28

 * Playing "Bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
 * Look (August 10, 1954).

 * [Asked about the vogue for Rock 'n' Roll and calypso] [N]o matter what you call it, music is as good as it sounds. Music is an oral art. Until you hear it, it is not music and if it sounds good it is good.
 * Quoted in "Ellington Jazz Story On Tonight", St. Louis Globe-Democrat (May 8, 1957), p. 11C
 * Published just before A Drum is a Woman was telecast. Rendered as "If it sounds good, it IS good" in J.D. Moore's Ten Commandments for The Studio

 * The piano players were very important in the early days, and the great piano players were always on the East Coast; there never was anybody in the West who could play two notes. (By West I mean ; in those days there was no other West to speak of, west of that.), who was mainly a writer and had more music published than anyone else, played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz. Among other things, his rhythm was unsteady; but that's the kind of piano the West was geared up to. On the other hand, the piano players on the East Coast did the most impossible things. If you dig up the early piano rolls or records by , you will hear the most beautiful and perfect performances.  was a giant of those days, too. It is one of my great regrets that when the Lion used to come up to my house I didn't have a recording machine so that I could preserve some of those early performances of his.
 * From "Appreciations: The Encyclopedia of Jazz," transcription of a recording made by Ellington at Leonard Feather's request, in The Encyclopedia of Jazz (1960) by Feather, p. 14

1961–1973

 * It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.
 * On jazz New York Herald Tribune (July 9, 1961).

 * There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed.
 * Where Is Jazz Going? Music Journal (1962) Reproduced in The Duke Ellington Reader, ISBN 978-0-19-509391-9.

 * Every man prays in his own language.
 * Section title and eponymous song of A Concert of Sacred Music (1965).

 * How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, "I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place." Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
 * Program notes for A Concert of Sacred Music (1965).

 * Fate is being kind to me. [...] Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
 * "2 Pulitzer Judges Resign in Protest", The New York Times (May 13, 1965), p. 41
 * Ellington was then aged 66.

The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem [...] It never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the nineteen-twenties, I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "negro music". But it's too late for that now. The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind.
 * [Asked about his "fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young" comment] What else could I have said? [...] In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes. I work and I write, and that's it. My reward is hearing what I have done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me. And secondly, I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European music–classical music, if you will–is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him. We were given a dispensation, I must admit. We did one radio program dedicated to him. But by and large, then as now, jazz was the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
 * Interviewed by Nat Hentoff for "This Cat Needs No Pulitzer Prize", The New York Times magazine (September 12, 1965), p. SM 64–65

 * Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.
 * Music Is My Mistress (1973).

Quotes about Ellington

 * Louis Armstrong was on J-and never got off his J-never, never stopped. I mean for all intents and purposes, died with his trumpet in his hand. So did Duke Ellington, all those people who inspire one, who inspire me. Duke was still going on the road right up till the last. Louis Armstrong still on the road till the very last. I appreciate that, I respect it and I am grateful for it. I am grateful, in the name of my grandson I am grateful.
 * 1977 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * Of course anything that Duke does I like. He just seems to have a sixth sense about things turning out so good ... But I especially like the marriage between strings and what he did with the band. He didn't confine the strings to just whole notes and half notes, which most guys do, but he gave them little pizzicato things and little staccato things in there, which works out beautifully ....
 * , circa 1964, reviewing "Nonviolent Integration" from  for 's "Blindfold Test"; excerpted in The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties (1960) by Leonard Feather, p. 26.

 * Well, that's about the quintessence of slick, professional, expert, boring arrangement. I couldn't say offhand who it was. As I say, I haven't heard jazz for a year. I found it dull—the last word in polish and professionality [sic]—but dull.
 * Leonard Bernstein, circa 1953, reviewing Ellington's recording of "Satin Doll" for 's "Blindfold Test"; as quoted in The Encyclopedia of Jazz (1960) by Leonard Feather, p. 474

 * That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality.
 * Clare Fischer, reviewing "Agra" from Far East Suite, in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" by Leonard Feather, in DownBeat (October 19, 1967), p. 38

 * As Duke Ellington once said, "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton." [...] About that Wellington guy, I wouldn't know. Duke Ellington, yes. As for that Eton business — well, I married my first wife in Elkton, and I always hated the place. It musta stuck.
 * Babe Ruth, attempting unsuccessfully—during a partially scripted radio interview, broadcast live on August 13, 1930—to deliver a familiar but evidently apocryphal quote, followed by his explanation for that failure; as quoted in The Tumult and the Shouting; My Life in Sport (1954) by Grantland Rice; reprinted in "The World I Loved — Part 1: My Baseball Hall of Fame" by Rice, in The New York Herald Tribune (October 3, 1954), pp. 8-9

title: Duke Ellington


text:
Ferdinand Eisenstein

Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein (16 April 1823 – 11 October 1852) was a German mathematician.

Quotes

 * As a boy of six I could understand the proof of a mathematical theorem more readily than that meat had to be cut with one's knife, not one's fork.
 * Curriculum Vitae - an autobiographical statement written when Eisenstein was 20, often referred to as his "Autobiography" (1843)

 * What attracted me so strongly and exclusively to mathematics, apart from the actual content, was particularly the specific nature of the mental processes by which mathematical concepts are handled. This way of deducing and discovering new truths from old ones, and the extraordinary clarity and self-evidence of the theorems, the ingeniousness of the ideas... had an irresistible fascination for me. Beginning from the individual theorems, I grew accustomed to delve more deeply into their relationships and to grasp whole theories as a single entity. That is how I conceived the idea of mathematical beauty...
 * Curriculum Vitae (1843)

Quotes about Eisenstein

 * There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians: Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
 * Carl Friedrich Gauss, as quoted in Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science (1951) by Eric Temple Bell

 * As any reader of Eisenstein must realise, he felt hard pressed for time during the whole of his short mathematical career... His papers, although brilliantly conceived, must have been written by fits and starts, with the details worked out only as the occasion arose; sometimes a development is cut short, only to be taken up again at a later stage.
 * André Weil in Elliptic functions according to Eisenstein and Kronecker (1999)

 * As Eisenstein shows, his method for constructing elliptic functions applies beautifully to the simpler case of trigonometric functions. Moreover, this case provides not merely an illuminating introduction to his theory, but also the simplest proofs for a series of results, originally discussed by Euler.
 * André Weil in Elliptic functions according to Eisenstein and Kronecker (1999)

 * Looking back from today's vantage, Eisenstein's mathematics appear to us more up to date than ever. It is not so much the harvest of theorems, nor the creation of full-fledged theories, but the way of looking at things which amazes us...
 * Norbert Schappacher in Mathematics in Berlin (1998)

title: Ferdinand Eisenstein


text:
Lisp (programming language)

Lisp is a family of computer programming languages based on formal functional calculus. Lisp (for "List Processing Language") stores and manipulates programs in the same manner as any other data, making it well suited for "meta-programming" applications. One of the oldest "high level" programming languages (second only to Fortran), Lisp continues to be popular in the field of artificial intelligence down to the present day.

About Lisp

 * Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
 * Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866.

 * Lisp is a programmable programming language.
 * John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991.

 * SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.
 * Philip Greenspun, blog, 07-03-2005.

 * One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.
 * Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

 * God wrote in Lisp code When he filled the leaves with green. The fractal flowers and recursive roots: The most lovely hack I've seen.
 * Bob Kanefsky, "Eternal Flame"

 * The greatest single programming language ever designed.
 * Alan Kay, about LISP. Quoted in Daniel H. Steinberg, "Daddy, Are We There Yet? A Discussion with Alan Kay", openP2P, 3 April 3 2003.

 * I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were "Maxwell’s Equations of Software!"
 * Alan Kay, A Conversation with Alan Kay, ACM Queue  2 (9), (Dec/Jan 2004-2005).

 * LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.
 * John McCarthy (1974) "History of Lisp," as quoted in: Avron Barr, . The Handbook of artificial intelligence, Volume 2. Addison-Wesley, 1986. p. 5.

 * One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.
 * John McCarthy, "History of Lisp," 12 February 1979; republished at www-formal.stanford.edu.

 * The conception of list processing as an abstraction created a new world in which designation and dynamic symbolic structure were the defining characteristics. The embedding of the early list processing systems in languages (the IPLs, LISP) is often decried as having been a barrier to the diffusion of list processing techniques throughout programming practice; but it was the vehicle that held the abstraction together.
 * Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, 1975 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (March 1976): p. 118.

 * Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
 * Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker.

 * Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
 * Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

 * By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals. And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.
 * Larry Wall, "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...", O'Reilly: perl.com, 6 December 2007.

 * APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud - it still looks like Lisp.
 * Joel Moses, in

At once, just like they said, I felt a great enlightenment. I saw the naked structure of Lisp code unfold before me. (My god. It's full of "car"s.) The patterns and metapatterns danced. Syntax faded, and I swam in the purity of quantified conception. Of ideas manifest. Truly, this was the language from which the Gods wrought the universe! [God replies:] "No, it's not. [...] I mean, ostensibly, yes. Honestly, we hacked most of it together with Perl."
 * Last night, I drifted off while reading a Lisp book. Suddenly, I was bathed in a suffusion of blue.
 * Randall Munroe, XKCD 224

 * 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular... Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high.
 * Iry James, A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
 * 1978 - John Allen in the chapter on Implications of LISP writes: "the power of high level languages is notational rather than computational". This insight is the most significant lesson that LISP teaches, and points to the possibility of going Beyond Programming in the "Age of Significance"
 * John Allen: Anatomy of LISP

Comparing Lisp to other languages

 * Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.
 * Paul Graham (2001) "Arc: An Unfinished Dialect of Lisp." paulgraham.com, November 2001.

 * Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
 * Philip Greenspun, as quoted in Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O'Reilly: 2004), ISBN 0596006624, p. 198
 * Greenspun indicates on his website that he does not recall where he originally wrote this, and laments in correspondence (2003) that this quip may be all that posterity remembers of him.

 * Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people.
 * , cited in: Pat Eyler (2009) "MWRC 2009 Mini-Interview: Philippe Hanrigou", on-ruby.blogspot.nl March 3, 2009.

 * Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.
 * Alan Perlis, as quoted in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman.

 * C is coupled with Unix in the worse-is-better scenario, and can anyone seriously propose Lisp as the right-thing alternative? Lisp, face it, is used for advanced research and development in AI and other esoteric areas. It has weird syntax, and almost all other computer languages share a non-Lispy syntax. Syntax, folks, is religion, and Lisp is the wrong one. Lisp is used by weirdos who do weirdo science.
 * Richard P. Gabriel (as Nickieben Bourbaki), in Worse is Better is Worse

 * Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.
 * Eric S. Raymond, in Open Sources on MIT's first OS, ITS

 * You can use C++ if you want with GNOME, but we don't assume that you're going to write C++. It's to a large extent based on Scheme, which is a dialect of LISP. LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers.
 * Richard Stallman in: "GNU's Not Linux" Network World Fusion, 01/11/99.

 * The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't appreciate what a powerful language is. Once you learn Lisp you will see what is missing in most other languages.
 * Richard Stallman, [How I do my computing]

 * And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?

 * A notable group of exceptions to all the previous systems are Interactive LISP [...] and TRAC. Both are functionally oriented (one list, the other string), both talk to the user with one language, and both are "homoiconic" in that their internal and external representations are essentially the same. They both have the ability to dynamically create new functions which may then be elaborated at the users's pleasure. Their only great drawback is that programs written in them look like King Burniburiach's letter to the Sumerians done in Babylonian cuniform!
 * Alan Kay in his 1969 PhD thesis: The Reactive Engine (PhD). University of Utah. URL: http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html

Lisp macros

 * DOLIST is similar to Perl's foreach or Python's for. Java added a similar kind of loop construct with the "enhanced" for loop in Java 1.5, as part of JSR-201. Notice what a difference macros make. A Lisp programmer who notices a common pattern in their code can write a macro to give themselves a source-level abstraction of that pattern. A Java programmer who notices the same pattern has to convince Sun that this particular abstraction is worth adding to the language. Then Sun has to publish a JSR and convene an industry-wide "expert group" to hash everything out. That process--according to Sun--takes an average of 18 months. After that, the compiler writers all have to go upgrade their compilers to support the new feature. And even once the Java programmer's favorite compiler supports the new version of Java, they probably still can't use the new feature until they're allowed to break source compatibility with older versions of Java. So an annoyance that Common Lisp programmers can resolve for themselves within five minutes plagues Java programmers for years.
 * Peter Seibel (2005) Practical Common Lisp.

Attitude of Lisp programmers

 * Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg: they study the various new things that people do with interest and then find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they can use these new techniques if they think they need them.
 * Erik Naggum, "Re: Query About Lisp Use",

 * If you want to know why Lisp doesn't win around you, find a mirror.
 * Erik Naggum, "Re: Java is really convenient. Re: Sun thinks about switching Java to S-expression syntax: Lava",

 * In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)
 * Slide 9 in presentation to Lisp Users Group.

 * A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
 * Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), September 1982, pp. 7–13.

 * The Largest Disservice to LISP is most frequently done whenever a LISP advocate opens his/her mouth. LISP advocates have been, in my limited and biased experience, some of the most arrogant and condescending bastards in the world. (…) I have heard more than one LISP advocate state such subjective comments as, "LISP is the most powerful and elegant programming language in the world" and expect such comments to be taken as objective truth. I have never heard a Java, C++, C, Perl, or Python advocate make the same claim about their own language of choice.
 * Comment on Slashdot
 * Response: "To be fair, the Java, C++, C, Perl or Python advocate wouldn't have much of a case..."

 * In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP ... remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"
 * James Iry, A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages, blog entry, May 7 2009, retrieved October 3, 2017

Parentheses

 * Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form.
 * Robert Floyd, "The Paradigms of Programming", 1978 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 22 (8), August 1979: pp. 455–460.

 * (What the world needs (I think) is not (a Lisp (with fewer parentheses)) but (an English (with more.)))
 * Brian Hayes, "The Semicolon Wars", American Scientist

 * These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age.
 * Randall Munroe, "Lisp Cycles", XKCD 297.

 * Some said the world should be in Perl, Some said in Lisp. Now, having given both a whirl, I held with those who favored Perl. But I fear we passed to men A disappointing founding myth. And should we write it all again, I'd end it with A close-paren.
 * Randall Munroe, "With Apologies to Robert Frost", XKCD 312, in a parody of Robert Frost

 * Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.
 * Larry Wall, "Wherefore Art, Thou?", The Perl Journal 1(1); reprinted in Linux Journal, March 1, 1997.

title: Lisp (programming language)


text:
User:Baryon~enwikiquote

See my Wikipedia user page.

title: User:Baryon~enwikiquote


text:
User talk:Zzyzx11

Hi. Welcome to English Wikiquote. Enjoy!
 * To ask for help or to talk with another editor, visit our Village pump.
 * To browse Wikiquote, take a look at our browsing start page.
 * To sign with a date, write four tildes ( ~ ) and save.
 * Be bold.

Zzyzx11 16:32, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thank you very much, although I spend most of my time at http://en.wikipedia.org. Zzyzx11 16:32, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Welcome back ;-) Your reading of our tentative Manual of Style will be very appreciated. --Aphaia 06:08, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Zzyzx11