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. It 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. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
More Quotes from Norbert Wiener:
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.Norbert Wiener
The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
Norbert Wiener
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
A professor is one who can speak on any subject for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener
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.
Norbert Wiener
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
Norbert Wiener
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Based on Topics: Mathematics Quotes, Reputation QuotesBased on Keywords: erased, inattention, relegated, wastebasket
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