Quote

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

Norbert Wiener

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Norbert Wiener
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 26
Died: 1964
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Psychologist
University Teacher
Columbia
Missouri
Norbert Vineris
Norbert Viner
Show
Math
Erased
Shows
Clearly
Corrected
Logic
Blunders
Mathematics
Pencil
Field
Stroke
Tend
Pencils
Advantage
Strokes
Fields
Reasoning

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

Image
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.
Norbert Wiener
Image
A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
Norbert Wiener
Image
In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy
Norbert Wiener
Image
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.
Norbert Wiener
Image
I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.
Norbert Wiener
Image
There are no answers, only cross references.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
Norbert Wiener
Image
A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.
Norbert Wiener
Image
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.
Norbert Wiener
Image
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Norbert Wiener
Image
We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.
Norbert Wiener