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All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It's terribly hard on the kids. It's also hard on the teachers. And I think it's totally useless.

Freeman Dyson

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Freeman Dyson
Age: 96 †
Born: 1923
Born: December 15
Died: 2020
Died: February 28
Mathematician
Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
Professor
Theoretical Physicist
Crowthorne
Berkshire
Freeman John Dyson
Freeman J. Dyson
Time
Teacher
Mathematically
Think
Worry
Literate
Thinking
Getting
Terribly
Stuff
Worrying
Kids
Pushing
Also
Teachers
Hard
Useless
Children
Totally

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
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The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
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You could say science also is an art.
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The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.
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We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
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All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.
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Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.
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Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.
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Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
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It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.
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The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.
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I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines.
Freeman Dyson
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If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.
Freeman Dyson
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It's us that's really amazing. As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.
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I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
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Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.
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We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.
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To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.
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Everything in my life was luck.
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I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.
Freeman Dyson