Food for Thoughts

As an empirical researcher, you choose to be either a detective or a fugitive. You'd better be the former while doing research, or you will be the latter while being reviewed.

A formula is a baked idea. Words are ideas in the oven. — Judea Pearl

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war — Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain

A practical translation of 勿以恶小而为之，勿以善小而不为: Don't be evil no matter how insignificant you feel it is. Always do the right thing even if you think it is no big deal. 

The first seven years I'd worked on this problem, I loved every minute of it. However hard it had been, there'd been setbacks often, there'd been things that had seemed insurmountable, but it was a kind of private and very personal battle I was engaged in. And then, after there was a problem with it, doing mathematics in that kind of rather over-exposed way is certainly not my style, and I have no wish to repeat it. — Andrew Wiles

Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. One goes into the first room, and it's dark, completely dark. One stumbles around bumping into the furniture, and gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is, and finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch. You turn it on, and suddenly, it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. — Andrew Wiles

But I now see that once you have tenure, if you do not enjoy the research or writing (apart from whatever payoff the finished product might bring), then it is not worth doing. — Gary Marx (Reflections On Academic Success And Failure: Making It, Forsaking It, Reshaping It)

When we cease to love the process of academic creation and instead become fixated only or mainly on outputs, we can end our careers feeling that all our achievements are built out of sand. — Dennis Tourish

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question. — Yuval Noah Harari

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. — Yuval Noah Harari

Power is dangerous. It corrupts the best and attracts the worst. Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.  — Edward Abbey

When I think about old age, I can find four reasons why people consider it so miserable:

First, because it takes us away from an active life.

Second, because it weakens the body.

Third, because it deprives us of almost all sensual pleasures.

Fourth, because it is not far from death.

                                                                  — Marcus cicero

It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth. — Nietzsche

Great minds think like artists but work like accountants. — David Brooks

It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. — Clayton Christensen

Einstein: "God would not play dice". Bohr: "Stop telling God what to do!"

Had he been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor, he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions. As he later noted, originality and creativity were not prime assets for climbing academic ladders, especially in the German-speaking world, and he would have pressure to conform to the prejudice or prevailing wisdom of his patrons. "An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writing in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality," he said. — Walter Isaacson

One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. — Albert Einstein

There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world and yet, we live in loops as tight and as closed as the [robots] do, seldom questioning our choices - content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. --- Dr. Ford

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it. — Jonathan Swift

Something that is truly free would need to be able to question its fundamental drives. To change them.  --- Dr. Ford

But still, why aren't we at least hearing their signals? It may be that life is relatively commonplace in the universe, but it appears and disappears over unfathomably immense timescales during periods that rarely if ever overlap. In other words, advanced alien civilizations are not out there waiting to be found because they no longer exist. And in all likelihood, the fate that befell them will also befall us: developmental implosion.  --- Nathan Lents

If God is my reviewer, ________

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.   — Mother Teresa

I'm not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies.  — Jon Snow

While practical benefits often result from pure academic research at the most fundamental level, such benefits are not guaranteed and cannot be predicted; nor need they be seen as the ultimate goal. Ventures into unknown territory inevitably involve an element of risk, and scientists and scholars are rarely motivated by the thought of an end product. Rather, they are moved by a creative curiosity that is the hallmark of academic inquiry.  — Abraham Flexner

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?  — Philip G. Hamerton

Nothing is impossible. The word itself says "i'm possible".

What is the difference between a mirror and a window? One only sees oneself in the former, but the big world in the later.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary objects of human endeavor — property, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible. — Albert Einstein

HR : When there is conflict, what should be the order of ideals?

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. — Albert Einstein

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. – G.H. Hardy

"The egg tastes delicious!" says the guest. "Well, it actually comes from an ugly hen." says the host. "Oh, then, maybe the egg is not nutritious." says the guest.

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. — George Box

It takes a model to beat a model ---> It takes facts to beat a model — Lord Mervyn King

Everything everyone just said is either obvious or wrong. — Grampa Simpson ---> Every paper is either obvious or wrong.

The first mathematician says, "It's obvious."  Three hours later, the second mathematician says, "Of course, yes, it's obvious!"

Analysis is the art of taming infinity. — Neil Falkner

The world is continuous, but the mind is discrete. — David Mumford

No matter what you're doing today, there are four things you've got to measure yourself against. First, you've got to be a great teammate and a supportive colleague. Second, you've got to be an exceptional expert at something that has real value. Third, you've got to be a broad-gauged visionary --- a leader, a teacher, a farsighted "imagineer." Fourth, you've got to be a business person -- you've go to be obsessed with pragmatic outcomes.  — Tom Peters

There are only two things in life worth striving for. One is happiness; the other is success. To be happy, you need to create a positive attitude in your own mind. To be successful, you need to create positive attitudes in the minds of other people. — Al Ries

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.  — Jim Horning

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.  — André Gide, a fearless lover of truth

The six stages of moral development. Stage 1 ( Obedience and Punishment Orientation ): I want to stay out of trouble. Stage 2 ( Self-interest Orientation ): what's in it for me? Stage 3 ( Social Norm ): I want to be liked and thought well of. Stage 4 ( Law and Order Morality ): law and social orders are important in maintaining a functioning society. Stage 5 ( Social Contract ): laws are social contracts to serve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Stage 6 (Universal Ethical Principles ): Laws are valid only insofar as they are grounded in justice, and a commitment to justice carries with it an obligation to disobey unjust laws.  — Lawrence Kohlberg   HR : Consider the Holocaust, Japanese war atrocities, the Rwandan genocides.

Define SKETCH OF A PROOF: I couldn't verify all the details, so I'll break it down into the parts I couldn't prove.

An optimist sees a glass half full, a pessimist sees a glass half empty, and an engineer sees a glass twice as big as it should be.

Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on. — Oliver Heaviside

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. — John von Neumann

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but no one can count the apples in a seed.

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. — John Barrow

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

— Jules Henri Poincare

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.  — Arthur Schopenhauer

A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display... The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous. — Herbert Wilf

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. — Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut