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

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

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It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.
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To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
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What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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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.
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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
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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.
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Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
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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.
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A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.
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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.
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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
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There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.
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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'
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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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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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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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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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