Quotes
Here's some crazy, outlandish, or just plain funny quotes which I have acquired somewhere or other along my life journey. Enjoy.
"We must instill in our students the expectation of tedium and disappointment and the duty of thorough persistence, by now so well achieved in the biological and physical sciences. We must expand our student's vow of poverty to include not only the willingness to accept poverty of finances, but also a povery of experimental results."
-- Campell & Stanley, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental
Designs for Research, 1966
(Thanks Nick for this one!)
"Weapons of mass destruction, including evil chemistry and evil biology, are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community."
-- John Ashcroft, Attorney General, reported in New York Times 01/2004
"To be really mediaeval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Baltimore is actually a very safe city if you are not involved in the
drug trade."
-- Dr. Peter Beilenson, Baltimore's health commissioner, reported
in New York Times 02/09/2005.
Here's a short compilation of some infamous quotes (some slightly paraphrased ;-) from Prof. Zlatko Tesanovic, gathered during the math methods and stat mech classes of 2002-2003:
"It will be like a light to you in dark rooms in the middle of the
night, when you are despairing and everything else has failed you... and
you will realize,
the Method of Steepest Descents is your only true friend."
"You should never mess with a mathematician named 'Fuchs'."
"To those who have more, everything will be given to them. Eventually, everything will be done by Gauss."
"There's a kind of religion in math... devotees of Mathematica."
"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (Ok, so
you've heard that one before. But how often has the proverbial "hammer"
been Taylor series expansion?!)
"I have nothing to say about that, and we will not use it in this course."
[on the Riemann Zeta Fn]
"We use now a piece of trickery..."
"So these are crumbs of the crumbs, but for physicists, that's good
enough." [on physicists working on Wall Street]
"Compactness means no matter how far you go, there you are."
"Dirac was a different sort of guy... in fact, people always suspected he
was an alien. A real one, not just a foreigner."
"Even Einstein's name doesn't appear as often as Dirac's."
"The problem with liquids is that they are not a gas."
"Ignorance doesn't have to contain logic -- truth -- behind it."
And here's a link to
the page of a former Hopkins undergrad, who also has quotes from
some of our favorite teachers, especially Zlatko!
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