Quotes about him Quotes
87 quotes
"Lobachevski had to teach Geometry; and began by an intensive critical study of Euclid, acting as devil's advocate. This approach to the anomalous parallel axiom resulted in his non-Euclidean Geometry."
"Our author first made a name by his striking sketches "The Papers of a Sportsman" (Zapiski Okhotnika), in which the miserable condition of the peasants was described with startling realism. The work appeared in a collected form in 1852. It was read by all classes, including the emperor himself, and it undoubtedly hurried on the great work of emancipation."
"Unquestionably Turgueniev may be considered one of the great novelists, worthy to be ranked with Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot; with the genius of the last of these he has many affinities. His studies of human nature are profound, and he has the wide sympathies which are essential to genius of the highest order. A melancholy, almost pessimist, feeling pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis which seems natural to the Slavonic mind. The closing chapter of “A Nest of Nobles” is one of the saddest and at the same time truest pages in the whole range of existing novels."
"There are some great men of science whose charm consists in having said the first word on a subject, in having introduced some new idea which has proved fruitful; there are others whose charm consists perhaps in having said the last word on the subject, and who have reduced the subject to logical consistency and clearness. I think by temperament Lord Rayleigh belonged to the second group."
"A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself. -David Pennac"
"Vogüé was a stoic, but beneath his moral austerity there glowed humanity none the less attractive because it was veiled by reserve."
"[On his anti-AI stance] “He fell out of the field ten years ago, and hasn’t done a damn thing since ELIZA,” one MIT colleague said contemptuously. An old friend of Weizenbaum’s shook his head sadly. “I have the impression that if Joe could do science, he wouldn’t be doing this. When I gave a talk about my AI work a couple of years ago at MIT, it was Joe who came up to me—and I can’t tell you the feeling he said this with— that he’d give his right arm to have done what I’d done. MIT is an incredibly competitive place, and regardless of whether you have tenure, the pressure to produce is terrific. Joe hasn’t produced science, so he’s got to do something. I wish he hadn’t chosen this.”"
"The abuses might be either ideological or technological. If human intelligence were more successfully mirrored in the machine, will that not justify treating human beings as if they were MERE machines? [Weizenbaum’s] position on this is colored by the experience of Nazi Germany; but the argument is confused. The most savage tyrannies that I can find in history, including Nazism, had no doubt about a unique élan vital..."
"Weizenbaum went on to say that the geriatric robot was not only a sign of the authors’ lack of humanity; it symbolized the utter lack of humanity in anybody associated with the field of artificial intelligence. This, of course, was his main agenda; he’d been literally rubbing his hands together (I heard from Michael Dertouzos, one of his colleagues) as he roamed the halls of MIT, where he was then on the faculty. “This’ll get them,” he said to whoever would listen."
"নিঃসন্দেহে রায়হান রাফি ভাই আমার ক্যারিয়ারের জন্য একটা টার্নিং পয়েন্ট এবং অবশ্যই একজন লাকি চার্ম।"
"ছেলেটা মাদ্রাসায় পড়ছে, ভালো ইংরেজি বলে না, আমাদের হাই সোসাইটির সদস্য না বা ওর ছবিতে একটা র (স্বভাবগত) ব্যাপার থাকে, সেই জন্যে ওকে নিয়ে সুশীল সমাজ খুব একটা টগবগায় না। কিন্তু ওর প্রথম শর্ট ফিল্ম দেখার পরেই আমার মনে হয়েছিল, রাফি অডিও-ভিজ্যুয়াল ল্যাঙ্গুয়েজটা বোঝে। এমন না যে সে একটা ফিনিশড প্রোডাক্ট।"
""Of course, as a young filmmaker, Rafi has his own drawbacks but choosing a story of this scale, and depth must deserve applause. Also, inspiring the younger generation to learn more about Bangladesh’s independence while keeping the film entertaining is a huge plus. Despite receiving massive backlash and threats from different fundamentalist groups in Bangladesh, Raihan Rafi did not change the scene where Razakars slaughtered a doctor for helping the freedom fighters and they kept chanting ‘Nara-e-Takbir Allahu Akbar’ (Shout God is Great) while doing it. We need more filmmakers like Raihan Rafi who are not just visionary, but also bold enough to portray Bangladesh and its history the way it really took place"."
"They made the mistake there of assigning Onsager to the basic Chemistry I, II course. He just couldn't think at the level of a freshman. Frankly, he was fired. I won't say he was the world's worst lecturer, but he was certainly in contention. He was difficult to understand anyway, but he also had the habit of lecturing when his back was to the students and he was writing on the blackboard. To compound matters, he was a big man, and students had to peer round him just to try and see what was being written."
"He had been warned that non-theoreticians would be present and that he should phrase his talk in not too technical language. He plunged, nevertheless, into the mathematics of spinor algebras. After about twenty minutes, one of the many experimentalists in the audience had the courage to ask him what a spinor was. Onsager replied, thoughtfully: "A spinor--no, a set of spinors--is a set of matrices isomorphic to the orthogonal group." With that he gave the famous Onsager grin, twinkled his Nordic blue eyes at the bewildered faces around him, and continued the lecture as if nothing had happened."
"Onsager regarded chess, so he said, as too much like real problem-solving to spend much time on it. When he wanted to unwind from his work he would play solitaire, and bridge was a good relaxation in company."
"... when asked by Longworth how he would explain the electrophoretic effect in "physical terms," he picked up Longsworth, chair and all, and carried him across the room."
"One day Onsager told him he had decided to try an experiment on the separation of isotopes by thermal diffussion. "Fine," said Kraus, and was doubly pleased when Lars told him that the only equipment he would need was a long tube. But his encouragement was quickly withdrawn when Onsager explained that the tube must be made of platinum and would have to stretch from the basement to the third floor of the chemistry building. Kraus never pestered him again about doing an experiment, which "was too bad," writes Julian Gibbs, "because no one succeeded in conducting this experiment until more than a decade later, when it was needed as part of the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb.""
"Riding together in a taxi from some airport Kittler tried to explain to Luhmann that in contrast to social systems, switching circuits cannot exist without input and output. "Herr Kittler, it was like that already in Babylonia. A messenger rides through the city gate. Some [like me] ask, what kind of message he brings. Others [like you] ask what kind of horse he rides.""
"Kittler's project was to trace "not the triumphal emergence of humanity into freedom, but our exit from the fulsome enjoyment of our taste for ourselves that assigns humanity a place to which it has no right"."
"Unlike Foucault, or indeed other leading media theorists such as Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, Kittler steeped himself in physics, engineering, optics, the science of fibre-optic cables, and even wrote computer code – arguably gaining a more profound insight into media than his contemporaries."
"For Kittler, [Geisteswissenschaften, "humanities", but more literally "spirit sciences"] to be taken to its hard core: sciences stand at the centre of arts and humanities in the age of technical media... media are not only the mass media of television, newspapers and such, but a technical constellation that at its core is based on scientific principles of coding, channeling and decoding of signals... Man is a temporary solution, a crossroad in the complex practices and epistemologies of knowledge that might (has?) proved to be not so useful anymore when media can communicated to each other without human intervention. Ask your plugged-in Ethernet cable, it knows the amount of data that goes through it without you pushing even a single key."
"Kittler wanted to establish a real computer literacy. And our group was both the justifying nucleus of this demand and his evidence of possibility."
"The end of media is a situation in which the computer subsumes all other media. The machine subject appears as a sort of minimalist inhuman subjectivity wrought by recursion. It operates beyond or below the phenomenological capacities of humans, does not employ natural language, and does not think in terms of meaning. Myriad machine subjects are networked to form a loop of absolute knowledge. This loop excludes humanity which is functionally unable to participate therein. Within the loop, the machines cognize somehow in an asemantic logic and antagonistically evolve away from any semblance of humanity."
"Brilliant, controversial and cantankerous. In his penetrating examination of our increasingly militarised and 'mediatised' existence that, he argued, replaced human agency, Kittler outlined with great energy the post-human historical condition. Perhaps his greatest academic transgression was to have such an emphatic sense of technology's triumph over the delusions of human agency, articulated in his writings on war and speed, mathematics and cryptography, in addition to the style of his claims, sculpted like a series of steps of military escalation, in imitative performance of the computerised world of total militarisation and technologisation that he portrayed."
"Hilberts Doktor-Vater Ferdinand Lindemann nannte diesen Existenzbeweis „unheimlich“ und Paul Gordan meinte (zitiert nach Otto Blumenthal ‚ Lebensgeschichte‘ in Hilberts ‚Gesammelten Abhandlungen‘, Band 3 (Berlin 1935), S. 388–429, dort S. 394): „Das ist keine Mathematik; das ist Theologie.“ Etwas später milderte Gordan seinen Ausspruch etwas ab und meinte: „Ich habe mich davon überzeugt, daß die Theologie auch nützlich sein kann“. Aber es gab auch viele Mathematiker, die sich nicht überzeugen ließen. Oskar Becker (1889–1964) beispielsweise reagierte sehr heftig und bezeichnete den Hilbert’schen Beweis des Basis-Satzes als „Schleichweg einer Schein-Konstruktion“ (O. Becker in: ‚Mathematische Existenz‘, 1927, op. cit., S. 471)."
"Der Beweis des Hilbertschen Satzes und anderer Sätze ist sehr abstrakt, aber an sich ganz einfach und darum logisch zwingend. Eben darum leitet diese Arbeit von Hilbert eine neue Epoche der algebraischen Geometrie ein. Ebenso einfach ist dann auch die Anwendung auf die Invariantentheorie, die ich hier noch weniger zergliedern kann. Die ganze Frage der Endlichkeit der Invarianten, welche Gordan seinerzeit nur mit umfangreichen Rechnungen für binäre Formen hatte erledigen können (vgl. oben S. 308), wird hier mit einem Schlage für Formen mit beliebig vielen Veränderlichen gelöst. Ihrer Eigenart entsprechend wurde diese Arbeit zunächst mit sehr verschiedener Stimmung aufgenommen. Mich hat sie damals bestimmt, Hilbert bei nächster Gelegenheit nach Göttingen zu ziehen. Gordan war anfangs ablehnend: „Das ist nicht Mathematik, das ist Theologie.“ Später sagte er dann wohl: „Ich habe mich überzeugt, daß auch die Theologie ihre Vorzüge hat.“ In der Tat hat er den Beweis des Hilbertschen Grundtheorems selbst später sehr vereinfacht (Münchener Naturforscherversammlung 1899)."
"The proof of this theorem of Hilbert's and of others is very abstract, but in itself quite simple and hence logically compelling. And for just this reason this work of Hilbert's ushered in a new epoch of algebraic geometry. But application to invariant theory is just as simple, but I can analyze it here even less. The whole question of the finiteness of the invariants, which Gordan had been able to solve for binary forms only by means of comprehensive calculations (see p. 290), is here solved, with one stroke, for forms with arbitrarily many variables. Because of its uniqueness, this work was first received with very diverse reactions. I had then resolved to draw Hilbert to Goettingen at the earliest opportunity. Gordan at first declined, saying, "It is not mathematics, it is theology" But later he said: "I have convinced myself that even theology has its merits". In fact, Gordan himself later on much simplified Hilbert's basic theorem (Muenchener Naturforscherversammlung 1899)."
"A queer fellow, impulsive and one-sided. A great walker and talker - he liked that kind of walk to which frequent stops at a beer-garden or a cafe belong. Either with friends, and then accompanying his discussions with violent gesticulations, completely irrespective of his surroundings; or alone, and then murmuring to himself and pondering over mathematical problems; or if in an idler mood, carrying out long numerical calculations by heart. There always remained something of the eternal "Bursche" of the 1848 type about him – an air of dressing gown, beer and tobacco, relieved however by a keen sense of humor and a strong dash of wit. When he had to listen to others, in classrooms or at meetings, he was always half asleep."
"His strength rested on the invention and calculative execution of formal processes. There exist papers of his where twenty pages of formulas are not interrupted by a single text word; it is told that in all his papers he himself wrote the formulas only, the text being added by his friends."
"Gordan - anfänglich diesen begrifflichen Deduktionen gegenüber mehr ablehnend: „das ist keine Mathematik, das ist Theologie!" - ist dann zweimal (53), (69) dem diesem Beweise zugrunde liegenden Hilbertschen Endlichkeitssatze nähergetreten, indem er die gegebenen Formen F nach verschiedenen Kriterien in eine Reihe anordnete, die das Bilden eines endlichen Moduls aus ihnen deutlich machte; das erstemal in komplizierterer Weise speziell für die Invariantenformen, das zweitemal allgemein und einfach."
"38 Jahre von 1874 an hat Gordan in Erlangen verbracht. Sie sind für ihn gleichmäßig verlaufen: täglich Vorlesungen, Arbeit, und die unentbehrlichen Spaziergänge entweder mit Mitarbeitern … in drastisch lebhaften Zwiegesprächen, unbekümmert um alle Umgebung, oder allein in tiefem Nachdenken und seine Gedanken im Kopfe so fertig verarbeitend, dass er seine Rechnungen zuhause fast ohne Striche [Streichungen] ausführen konnte."
"In seiner eigenen Wissenschaft war es weniger ein Vertiefen in fremde Arbeiten -- denn solche las er sehr wenig -, als ein Überblick über die inneren Zusammenhänge und ein instinktives Gefühl für die Wege und Ziele der mathematischen Bestrebungen, was ihn schon aus kleinen Andeutungen Wertvolles von Minderem scheiden lieb. Aber den auf die Grundlagen gehenden Begriffsentwicklungen ist Gordan nie gerecht geworden: auch in seinen Vorlesungen hat er alle Grunddefinitionen begrifflicher Art, selbst die der Grenze, vollständig gemieden. Sein Vorlesungsprogramm hat sich nur auf die Vorlesungen allgemeiner Art, gelegentlich auch auf binäre Formentheorie, erstreckt; die Übungen waren mit Vorliebe der Algebra entnommen. Über Jacobisches, so über Funktionaldeterminanten, trug er gern vor, nie über Funktionentheoretisches, höhere Geometrie oder Mechanik; auch ließ er keine Seminarvorträge halten. Die Vorlesungen wirkten wesentlich durch die Lebhaftigkeit der Ausdrucksweise und durch eine zum Selbststudium anregende Kraft, eher als durch Systematik und Strenge."
"Gordan, eine in sich geschlossene Individualität, war kräftig und einheitlich im Leben und in der Arbeit. Kein Neuerer in der Wissenschaft: er griff nur an, was seiner Art gemäß war; aber was er angriff, führte er nnermüdlich durch bis zu Ende. Aus dem Stoffe selbst heraus neue kombinatorische Methoden zu schaffen und seine Instrumente kräftig zu handhaben, das war sein mächtiges Können: er war Algorithmiker."
"Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done."
"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."
"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."
"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."
"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."
"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."
"When the history of our Country is written by objective historians, your name will be placed even before that of Mr. Jinnah."
"Iskander Mirza’s strong-armed diplomacy along with the able guidance of Prime Minister Sir Firoz Khan Noon’s government throughout the acquisition process was instrumental in achieving the desired results. It was the only time since the initial accession of the princely states in 1947-8 that Pakistan’s territory had increased."
"General Gursel may be described as the father of the second Turkish Republic similar to Atatürk being the father of modern Turkey. At a time of deep division, Gursel earned and maintained the respect of the Turkish Nation that regarded him as the symbol of national unity. When he passed away, he had the identity of the trusted father of the nation."
"A few days before the coup, it was known that the coup was imminent but General Cemal Gursel was dismissed as a non-political general. No leading role by General Cemal Gursel was determined despite the foreknowledge of the plot."
"On 27 May, he (Cemal Gursel) was hurriedly requested to come (from his residence in İzmir) to the capital (Ankara) to assume the leadership of National Unity Committee."
"When 27 May revolt occurred, Cemal Gürsel was not a participant. He was invited to become the head due to the circumstances and he willingly accepted."
"General Gürsel was brought into the NUC chairmanship by the revolution team when he was in retirement preparation. In actuality he was in the position of a chairman found in last minute with a hurried search. He never was the responsible leader for a true leader is not to be appointed but is self-appointed."
"One of the core players of the coup, Orhan Erkanli told that they revolted on 27 May without knowing what to do on 28 May. No one, including Cemal Gürsel knew who and how many would be forming the NUC. In actuality, even Cemal Gürsel was brought in later."
"It is now known that the coup was the result of years of planning on the part of conspirators, a number of radical colonels and ranks below in their early forties. He (Cemal Gürsel) was not involved in the details of the organization of the coup d'état. When the coup had succeeded, he was brought to Ankara."
"We just see that a few very important lines in his letter (to the Minister of Defence) had been censored. That means we are going without learning the true history, without knowing who knows what facts and what true pictures of turning points."
"An extremely important document that sheds light on the past has been revealed. Testimony from eyewitnesses at the time helped make known that the letter had been modified after 27 May, but the location of the original letter was unknown. This important document adds a new dimension to the 27 May revolution. We have come face to face with a new document that changes our written history. It was my greatest wish to obtain just such a document; not for my own satisfaction, but for my father, to prove this reality and obtain genuine evidence. I was thrilled when I heard about this."
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