Four quotes unearthed during a dig through my notebook of early 1998:

• "The variety of proof techniques sometimes seems so large that students regard number theory as a "bag of tricks," but of course this is a matter of familiarity. What is a trick the first time one meets it is a device the second time and a method the third time." — W. J. Leveque (Fundamentals of Number Theory as quoted in Mathematical Recreations for the Programmable Calculator by Dean Hoffman & Lee Mohler, p. 7)
• "Bach, whose music has the most rules, also gives the most freedom, a paradoxical quality of creativity." — Michael Kimmelman (review of Bach-Busoni Goldberg Variations performed by David Buechner, New York Times 4 January 1998)
• "The relevance of bypass as a rhetorical device is forcibly shown by Tolstoy in War and Peace (the Maude translation, Bk. VI, Ch. VI, p. 22) in words that are, from our point of view at least, very striking; Tolstoy here describes Michael Speranski, who was for a time a favorite counsellor of the Tsar Alexander. After telling us that metaphysics was a resource the brilliant Speranski very frequently employed in argument, Tolstoy goes on to say: 'He would transfer a question to metaphysical heights, pass on to definitions of space, time, and thought, and having deduced the refutation he needed, would again descend to the level of the original discussion.' " — Z. A. Melzak (Bypasses: A Simple Approach to Complexity Chap. 11)
• The duties of the Astronomer Royal "... are so exiguous that they could be performed posthumously." — Sir Martin Rees (interview, New York Times 28 April 1998; "exiguous" = scanty, meager)

Monday, January 01, 2001 at 20:37:43 (EST) = 2001-01-01

TopicArt - TopicLiterature - TopicScience - TopicThinking

(correlates: BuechnerMagic, PureTheory, KenningConstructionKit, ...)