Brian Hayes Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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.

Brian Hayes
The collected literature of mathematics is treated as a sacred text to be guarded against corruption and dilution.

Brian Hayes
Dead diatoms are becoming rare elsewhere in the academic world, but mathematicians are still expected to be masters of blackboard technique.

Brian Hayes
A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace.

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

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

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

Brian Hayes
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.

Brian Hayes
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.

Brian Hayes
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."

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

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

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

Brian Hayes
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.

Brian Hayes
The condensation of all property in the hands of one individual is an economic catastrophe-something like the formation of a black hole in astrophysics. It's obviously bad news for the majority of the people, who are left penniless. But even if you happen to be the big winner, your victory may prove hollow. Although you have all the riches in the world, you can't buy a thing, because no one else has goods to sell.

Brian Hayes
Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance.

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

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

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

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

Brian Hayes
I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of - 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.

Brian Hayes
I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it.

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

Brian Hayes