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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

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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
Often
Compared
Moments
Count
Best
Latter
Chess
Mathematics
Field
Fields
Worst
Differs

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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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
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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.
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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.
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Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
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The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.
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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.
Norbert Wiener
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The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.
Norbert Wiener
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The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.
Norbert Wiener
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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
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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.
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The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
Norbert Wiener