"I have tried, with little success, to get……" — Richard Hamming
"I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of integers for counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep makes 13 sheep; that 6 stones plus 7 stones make 13 stones? Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible? To me this is one of the strongest examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Indeed, I find it both strange and unexplainable."
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Richard Hamming
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33 Quotes by Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming has 33 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.
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He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to…
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If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work.
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Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation…
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Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the…
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True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.
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Science is concerned with what is possible while engineering is concerned with choosing, from among the many possible ways, one…
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It may be said "In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." In…
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Mathematics is an interesting intellectual sport but it should not be allowed to stand in the way of obtaining sensible…
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When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in.…
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One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you…
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Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very…
See all 33 quotes by Richard Hamming »
More Abstraction Quotes
This quote is filed under Abstraction Quotes,
one of 249 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
— Josef Albers
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That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.
— Sarah Caldwell
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Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.
— Paul Cezanne
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So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.
— Deepak Chopra
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Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience,…
— Leo Buscaglia
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The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of…
— Evelyn Underhill
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The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor…
— Emma Goldman
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The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
— Piet Mondrian
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Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
— Paul Gauguin
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The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
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Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal…
— George Boole
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It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary; and it is one among a…
— Alexander Hamilton
See all 249 Abstraction Quotes »
