Engineer Quotes

Absolute authority will be delegated. Full responsibility will be assumed. Those who succeed will receive advancement and satisfaction of desire. Those who fail will die.

Mathematics is merely a shorthand method of recording physical intuition and physical reasoning, but it should not be a formalism leading from nowhere to nowhere, as it is likely to be made by one who does not realize its purpose as a tool.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

To tell you the truth although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experience I have had.

George Stephenson

I most enjoy helping to build something up, taking an unformulated enterprise and making it into what it could become.

Frederick Terman

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth.

When once the idea of the separate condensation was started, all these improvements followed as corollaries in quick succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in my mind, and I immediately set about an experiment to verify it practically.

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it.

Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of a computer in your own home.

Objects are the real and conceptual things we find in the world around us. An object may be hardware, software, a concept (e. g., velocity), or even "flesh and blood." Objects are complete entities, i. e., they are not "simply information" or "simply information and actions." Software objects strive to capture as completely as possible the characteristics of the "real world" objects which they represent. Finally, objects are "black boxes," i. e., their internal implementations are hidden from the outside world, and all interactions with an object take place via a well-defined interface.

Edward V. Berard

Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.

Typically, a subclass augments or redefines the existing structure and behavior of its superclasses.

The wonderful thing about dynamic typing is it lets you express anything that is computable. And type systems don't — type systems are typically decidable, and they restrict you to a subset. People who favor static type systems say it's fine, it's good enough; all the interesting programs you want to write will work as types. But that's ridiculous — once you have a type system, you don't even know what interesting programs are there.

Enterprise Engineering is defined as that body of knowledge, principles, and practices having to do with the analysis, design, implementation and operation of an enterprise. In a continually changing and unpredictable competitive environment, the Enterprise Engineer addresses a fundamental question: how to design and improve all elements associated with the total enterprise through the use of engineering and analysis methods and tools to more effectively achieve its goals and objectives...

Donald H. Liles

Engineering is superficial only to those who view it superficially. At the heart of engineering lies existential joy.

Samuel C. Florman

The principles governing the behavior of systems are not widely understood.

Jay Wright Forrester

We consider an organization to be a set of constraints on the activities performed by agents. This view follows that of Weber, who views the process of bureaucratization as a shift from management based on self-interest and personalities to one based on rules and procedures.

Mark S. Fox | Michael Gruninger

The world about us can be looked at in a variety of ways. One way is to see the world as made up from many interacting systems: weather, societal, economic, ecological, floral, faunal, tectonic plate, oceanic, and so on. This is very much a connected view of the world: nothing is isolated and totally independent; everything is part of something bigger, and everything comprises many interacting parts — subsystems.

Project management is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives. Furthermore, project management utilises the systems approach to management by having functional personnel (the vertical hierarchy) assigned to a specific project (the horizontal hierarchy).

I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U.S.-one of unprecedented permissiveness. 'Fuzzification, is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation.

Rudolf E. Kálmán

A cottonwood leaf beetle scuttled out of the loosened earth, frantic legs working the sandy dirt, orange and black body desperate for a new hiding place. The sunset was fading, and a bloated ocher moon pushed its way into the dark blue sky.

There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values.

I love the drawing board because most of the work I do is of half scale, so I can have the complete car in front of me, whereas the CAD system limits you to the size of the screen.

Human anatomy is either general, specific, topographical or surgical. These terms do not imply the dissection and anatomy of generals, specialists, topographers and surgeons, as they might seem to imply, but really mean something else. I would explain here what they actually do mean if I had more room and knew enough to do it.