20 quotes found
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"
"Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway."
"Advice to students: Leap in and try things. If you succeed, you can have enormous influence. If you fail, you have still learned something, and your next attempt is sure to be better for it. Advice to graduates: Do something you really enjoy doing. If it isn’t fun to get up in the morning and do your job or your school program, you’re in the wrong field."
"C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess."
"Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought."
"Associative arrays are very very useful things and if you are only going to have one data structure that's the one to have. Because you could build everything else with it if you want."
"Diversity is one of the high priorities that I expected everybody in the leadership position at the university to be committed to."
"American public universities have as their primary mission to provide excellent educational opportunities to the entire population and to serve the public good."
"American universities are united in the view that foreign students enhance the research and education that we provide. Our country can only benefit by welcoming international talent."
"The next revolution in scientific discovery will depend on scientific interdependence."
"It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience."
"“Which is Better: the Latke or the Hamantash?” is not a valid question, even though this has now been debated for 50 years. * The question does not exhibit the necessary property of universality. * It is culturally biased, implies gender specificity, exhibits geographical chauvinism and appeals to special interests. * It is not value-free. This question would not pass scrutiny on an SAT test, since it unfairly favors one ethnic and gender group over another: e.g., it favors the NY and Brooklyn establishment over the Midwest Rust Belt, and pits female latke workers against male hamantash bakers. In short, it is Politically Incorrect. Physics does not ask which is better: the proton or neutron, baryon or lepton, helium or neon, the conductor or insulator. These are simply properties of nature. Rather, physics asks: “Why?” or “Which is more important or more fundamental?” or “Who published it first?”"
"The theory of harmonic forms in Riemannian manifolds may be regarded as a generalization of potential theory. It is therefore natural that the boundary value problems of this theory which generalize the classical Dirichlet and Neumann problems should play an important role in the theory."
"The propagation of elastic waves in a homogeneous solid is governed by a hyperbolic system of three linear second-order partial differential equations with constant coefficients. When the solid is also isotropic, the form of these equations is well known and provides the foundation of the conventional theory of elasticity (Love 1944). The explicit solution of the initial value, or Cauchy, problem for the isotropic case was found by Poisson, and in a different way by Stokes (1883). If the initial disturbance is sharp and concentrated, the resulting disturbance at a field point will consist of an initial sharp pressure wave, a continuous wave for a certain period, and a final sharp shear wave. The disturbance then ceases."
"The magnitude of Fundy tides may be seen as having been reached by a balance between a dissipative mechanism, with assumed quadratic frictional forces, and an energy imparting mechanism in the deep ocean where work done by the tide raising force is proportional to distance travelled and hence to the first power of amplitude. Further, it now appears that the second and third North Atlantic modes are those primarily stimulated by the Fundian resonance. To represent these processes within one model both the continental shelf shallows and oceanic areas must be included, as well as their zone of interaction across the continental shelf."
"The mathematical theory of the Navier-Stokes equations has centered upon basic questions of the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of solutions of the initial value problem for fluid motions in all of space or in a subdomain of finite or infinite extent. Such solutions, when they can be constructed or shown to exist, represent flows of a viscous incompressible fluid. In two space dimensions the theorem of existence, uniqueness and regularity was essentially completed thirty years ago by the work of Leray ..., Lions ... and Ladyzhenskaya ... who showed that a smooth solution of the initial value problem exists for arbitrary square-integrable initial data. For viscous, incompressible fluid motions in three space dimensions, ... the theorem of existence uniqueness and regularity has been proved only for sufficiently small initial data or in special cases such as cylindrical symmetry that essentially reduce the problem to two space dimensions in some sense."
"I think that mathematics will have to become more and more algorithmic if it is going to be active and vital in the creative life. This means it is necessary to rethink what we teach, in school, in college, and in graduate school. In our emphasis on deductive reasoning and rigor we have been following the Greek tradition, but there are other traditions—Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, Mayan—and these have all followed a more algorithmic, more numerical procedure. After all, the word algorithm, like the word algebra, comes from Arabic. And the numerals we use come from Hindu mathematics via the Arabs. We can’t regard Greek mathematics as the only source of great mathematics, and yet somehow in the last half century there has been such emphasis on the greatness of “pure” mathematics that the other possible forms of mathematics have been put down. I don’t mean that it is necessary to put down the rigorous Greek style mathematics, but it is necessary to raise up the status of the numerical, the algorithmic, the discrete mathematics."
"I’m convinced that, powered by hope and fueled by courage and anger, we have the power to transform our collective future."