English is the Lingua Franca of Computer Science.
--- Clyde Kruskal
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.
--- Merrick Furst
Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded.
--- Plato, Phaedrus
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
--- Gore Vidal
Nondeterminism means never having to say you're sorry.
--- Origin Unclear
If A equals success, then the formula is: A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.
--- Albert Einstein
The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm: (1) write down the problem; (2) think very hard; (3) write down the answer.
--- Murray Gell-mann
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.
--- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
--- A.A. Milne
It is in the nature of the problem that any method will become more prolix as the numbers get larger.
--- Karl Friedrich Gauss, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, 1801
Some people can't understand any sentence that has two quantifiers.
--- Marek Chrobak, quoted by Larry Larmore
I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong.
--- Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
Karpe diem.
--- Virginia Holt, on Karp's whirlwind two-hour visit to UNT in 1992
Come up with a really great quote, and your name will live forever.
--- Anonymous
After all, if cognitive intelligence is all that important in determining one's success in life, they ask, why do so many "A" students end up being managed by "C" students?
--- Clarence Page
That orange cover will never die.
--- Mike Langston
When a person has discovered the truth about something and has established it with great effort, then, on viewing his discoveries more carefully, he often realizes that what he has taken great pains to find might have been perceived with the greatest of ease.
--- Galileo
For a research worker, the unforgotten moments of his life are those rare ones, which come after years of plodding work, when the veil over nature's secret seems suddenly to lift and when what was dark and chaotic suddenly appears in a clear and beautiful light and pattern.
--- Gerty Cori
The theory of our modern technic shows that nothing is as practical as theory.
--- J. Robert Oppenheimer
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
--- Douglas Adams
I add only that errors in general detract from your credibility. Even if your reader does not herself know precisely what rules you are breaking, she will certainly notice whether your thoughts are easy to understand. If you write muddy, indecipherable prose, riddled with mistakes, your reader is bound to wonder how carefully you designed your study, collected your data, applied statistical techniques, or otherwise behaved like a respectable scientist.
--- Lyn Dupré, Bugs in Writing
I have easily progressed from a spacey young man to a spacey old one and only occasionally have attacks of common sense and logic.
--- Bob St. John
There's a touch of the priesthood in the academic world, a sense that a scholar should not be distracted by the mundane tasks of day-to-day living. I used to have great stretches of time to work. Now I have research thoughts while making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sure it's impossible to write down ideas while reading "Curious George" to a two-year-old. On the other hand, as my husband was leaving graduate school for his first job, his thesis advisor told him, "You may wonder how a professor gets any research done when one has to teach, advise students, serve on committees, referee papers, write letters of recommendation, interview prospective faculty. Well, I take long showers."
--- Susan Landau
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
--- Charles Babbage
I thought the following four [rules] would be enough, provided that I made a firm and constant resolution not to fail even once in the observance of them. The first was never to accept anything as true if I had not evident knowledge of its being so; that is, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to embrace in my judgment only what presented itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. The second, to divide each problem I examined into as many parts as was feasible, and as was requisite for its better solution. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly way; beginning with the simplest objects, those most apt to be known, and ascending little by little, in steps as it were, to the knowledge of the most complex; and establishing an order in thought even when the objects had no natural priority one to another. And the last, to make throughout such complete enumerations and such general surveys that I might be sure of leaving nothing out.
--- René Descartes
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
--- Leonardo da Vinci
The control of large numbers is possible, and like unto that of small numbers, if we subdivide them.
--- Sun Tze (5th-6th century)
It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, "Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof."
--- Ron Graham
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
--- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning; and when they cannot it's a sign our knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and when a Mathematical Reasoning can be had it's as great a folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark, when you have a Candle standing by you.
--- John Arbuthnot (1692)
It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
--- Aristotle
A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.
--- Manfred Eigen
Rejecting theory as useless in order to work only on everyday things is like proposing to cut the roots of a tree as they do not carry fruit.
--- Condorcet, 1775
M. B. Russell arrive á cette conclusion qu'une proposition fausse quelconque implique toutes les autres propositions vraies ou fausses. M. Couturat dit que cette proposition semblera paradoxale au premier abord. Il suffit cependant d'avoir corrigé une mauvaise thèse de mathématique, pour connatre combien M. Russell a vu juste. Le candidat se donne souvent beaucoup de mal pour trouver la première équation fausse; mais dès qu'il l'a obtenue, ce n'est plus qu'un jeu pour lui d'accumuler les résultats les plus surprenants, dont quelques uns peuvent même être exacts.
(M. B. Russell comes to the conclusion that a false proposition implies all the others true or false. M. Couturat says that this proposition would look paradoxical at first sight. It suffices, however to have corrected a bad PhD in mathematics, to acknowledge how right M. Russell was. The applicant works often hard to get to the first wrong equation; but as soon as he has got it, it is only a game to cumulate the most surprising results, including even some exact ones.)
--- Henri Poincaré, in Science et Methode
If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that's the way to become a computer scientist.
--- Richard Feynmann, in Feynmann Lectures on Computation. Contributed by Jeff Erickson
In presenting a mathematical argument the great thing is to give the educated reader the chance to catch on at once to the momentary point and take details for granted: his successive mouthfuls should be such as can be swallowed at sight; in case of accidents, or in case he wishes for once to check in detail, he should have only a clearly circumscribed little problem to solve (e.g. to check an identity: two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse). The unpractised writer, even after the dawn of a conscience, gives him no such chance; before he can spot the point he has to tease his way through a maze of symbols of which not the tiniest suffix can be skipped.
--- J. E. Littlewood, in A Mathematician's Miscellany, 1953.
I don't trust anyone who claims to give me an infinite object.
--- Albert Meyer
We're always eager to produce a new result
Even if an oracle we must consult
For though P=NP is ever open
To solve it we're still hopin'
And though exponential search we despise
We're not afraid to relativize
For we will never weary
Of Computer Science theory
--- Conference on Computational Complexity Theory, 1983
Metatheorem --- half of every iff proof is trivial.
--- Joel Spencer
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
--- Werner Heisenberg
Meegan's First Law: When heading in the wrong direction, speed is a disadvantage.
Meegan's Second Law: If something happens, it must be possible.
--- Charles (Chip) Meegan, NASA Scientist
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
--- Leslie Lamport
Not all things worth counting are countable and not all things that count are worth counting.
--- Albert Einstein
Never write software that anthropomorphizes computers. They really hate that.
--- Unknown
Some people say that a monkey would bang out the complete works of Shakespeare on a typewriter given an unlimited amount of time. In the meantime, what they would probably produce is a valid sendmail configuration file.
--- Nicholas Petreley
Les religions, se dissipent comme du brouillard. Les empires s'effondrent. Mais les travaux des savants demeurent pour l'éternité.
Religions dissolve as mist. Empires collapse. But works of scientists stay for eternity.
--- Ouloug Beg ou Ulug Beg émir de Transoxanie, astronome et mathématicien à Samarcande (1394-1449)
Faut-il s'étonner qu'on ne sache pas raisonner quand la langue des sciences n'est qu'un jargon composé de beaucoup trop de mots, dont les uns sont des mots trop vulgaires qui n'ont pas de sens déterminé, et les autres des mots étrangers ou barbares, qu'on entend mal.
Should we be surprised that one does not know how to reason when the language of the sciences is nothing but a jargon of much too many words, some of which so vulgar as to not have any definite meaning, while others are foreign or barbarian words one does not understand well.
--- Condillac, La logique ou les premiers développements de l'art de penser (chez Samson, 1804)
Cryptography is nothing more than the mathematical framework for discussing the implications of various paranoid delusions.
--- Don Alvarez
Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic.
--- Pierre Boutroux
It was [reported] that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger than the previous record.
--- John Blasik
A telephone response message: We're sorry, the number you have entered is imaginary. Please rotate your handset 90 degrees and try again.
--- Anonymous
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
--- Andrew Tannenbaum
"I'd like a large order of FiboNachos."
"Okay sir, that'll cost as much as a small order and a medium order combined."
--- Origin unknown