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Quotes from Group Theory in the Bedroom — Brian Hayes

born 1949 United States

← All quotes by Brian Hayes

18 quotes

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

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.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

I am reminded of those prodigies who spent years of their lives calculating digits of the decimal expansion of pi - a task that is now a mere warm-up exercise for computer software. I cannot help wondering which of my labors will appear equally quaint and pathetic to some future reader who ransacks libraries for old volumes like this one.

Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Brian Hayes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.