Popularity: 2
Vote:   | About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I mentioned the non-competitive spirit explicitly, because these days, excellence is a fashionable concept. But excellence is a competitive notion, and that is not what we are heading for: we are heading for perfection. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It helps hand-eye coordination if, as you're doing your formulae, you gently sing the notation. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Mathematicians are like managers - they want improvement without change. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The ability of discerning high quality unavoidably implies the ability of identifying shortcomings. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The students that, like the wild animal being prepared for its tricks in the circus called "life", expects only training as sketched above, will be severely disappointed: by his standards he will learn next to nothing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There should be no such thing as boring mathematics. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated and leaves the lecture hall commenting to each other: 'That was rather trivial, wasn't it?' The sore truth is that complexity sells better. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it. |