academics-from-belgium

"Thonissen was an intrepid worker, a firm Christian, an upright and simple man, with just a touch of artless vanity, though sometimes brusque in manner and given to occasional outbursts. He was one of the most important members of the faculty of law at Louvain and he will be chiefly remembered in the sphere of penal law, where his name is destined to survive."

"The national culture of Belgium is a synthesis, if I may so call it, where one finds the genius of two races — the Romance and the Germanic — mingled, yet modified by the imprint of the distinctively Belgian. It is in that very receptivity — the fact that it has absorbed and unified the best elements of Latin and Teutonic civilization — that the originality of the Belgian national culture resides."

"The history of mankind may have as many divisions as human life has aspects or sides. Its noblest form is the history of religion, as it developed in the past among the different groups of the human race. Reason shows that there can be only one true religion, based on the true knowledge and the proper worship of the one God. Thanks to the light of revelation we know that this one true religion is the Christian religion, and, since there are different forms of the Christian religion, that the true religion is in particular the one known as Catholic, concrete and visible in the Catholic Church. The history of Christianity, therefore, or more properly the history of the Catholic Church, is the most important and edifying part of the history of religion."

"Even if transparency were desirable and possible, it may be difficult to realize it in practice. For example, private companies may not be willing to reveal their algorithms because they want to protect their commercial interests."

"Machine learning can be used to recognize faces (and even recognize emotions based on analysis of the faces), make search suggestions, drive a car, make personality predictions, predict who is going to re-offend, or recommend music to listen to."

"Scientists used to create theories to explain data and make predictions; in machine learning, the computer creates its own models that fit the data"

"The danger is, once again, the exercise of power without knowledge and (therefore) without responsibility—and, worse, others being subjected to this"

"AI is already happening today and it is pervasive, often invisibly embedded in our day-to-day tools and as part of complex technological systems."

"Darwin and Freud dethroned our beliefs of exceptionalism, our feelings of superiority, and our fantasies of control; today, artificial intelligence seems to deal yet another blow to humanity's self-image"

"Of the 3rd millennium BC , Marc van de Mieroop confessed ‘the chronology is confused owing to the Sumerian king list’s practice of listing contemporaneous dynasties as successive.’"

"The study of the lexicon of the Northern European languages, especially Germanic and Baltic, reveals that a large number of terms relevant to the ecology of the habitat of the early populations of the area and to their socioeconomic activities have no plausible Indo-European etymology. (…) it is possible to ascribe to the pre-Indo-European substrate in the Baltic area a number of names of plants, animals, objects and activities characteristic of the Neolithic cultures."

"At his birth Muhammad had received the name Qutham, but since the Book of Allah had given him the name Ahmad and Muhammad, the Tradition, with a slightly apologetic ulterior motive, wants to hear of no other."

"As a matter of fact, a minority can transform a people when it wishes to dominate it effectively, when it has only contempt for it, regarding it as fit only for exploitation; as was the case with the Normans in England, the Musulmans wherever they appeared, and even the Romans in the conquered provinces. But the Germans wishes neither to destroy nor to exploit the empire. Far from despising it, they admired it. They did not confront it with any superior moral strength. Their heroic period ended with their settlement."

"The expansion of Islam was thus unable to absorb the whole of the Mediterranean. It encircled the Mediterranean on the East, the South, and the West, but it was unable to obtain a hold upon the North. The ancient Roman sea had become the frontier between Islam and Christianity. All the old Mediterranean provinces conquered by the Musulmans gravitated henceforth toward Baghdad. At the same time the Orient was cut off from the Occident. The bond which the Germanic invasion had left intact was severed. Byzantium was henceforth merely the centre of a Greek Empire which could no longer pursue Justinian's policy. It was reduced to defending its last possessions. Its farthest Western outposts were Naples, Venice, Gaeta and Amalfi. The fleet still enabled it to remain in touch with them, and thus prevented the Eastern Mediterranean from becoming a Musulman lake. But the Western Mediterranean was precisely that. Once the great means of communication, it was now an insuperable barrier. Islam had shattered the Mediterranean unity which the Germanic invasions had left intact. This was the most essential event of European history which had occurred since the Punic Wars. It was the end of the classic tradition. It was the beginning of the Middle Ages, and it happened at the very moment when Europe was on the way to becoming Byzantinized."

"Once seen, Pirenne could not be forgotten. He looked like, and indeed was, one of those big, vivacious burghers whom the Flemish artists of the seventeenth century liked to paint. His face in repose was somewhat heavy; the features did not quite fit their setting of trim beard and hair brushed smoothly back from his forehead. But when his interest was aroused and he began to talk, any impressions of this kind were forgotten. He was a most exuberant man and seemed to put all his strength into whatever he said or did. He could be overwhelming, though without intention; he was never overbearing, and one never felt the least frightened of him. It would not be surprising to learn that he had enemies or ruffled the feelings of the susceptible, but he was essentially kind-hearted, friendly, generous. His strength and vitality, not design, made him redoubtable; but he was single-minded, and never tried to be impressive. His services to Belgium and his unpleasant experiences during the war had made him, so to speak, a chartered freeman of his country."

"We understand fully the value of archaeology and we recognise the Department’s historic reputation."

"[The University of Sheffield] combines a number of things in a fairly unique way. It is world-class. At the same time it also has a set of values that are quite unique. People really have strong values, they care about the city and want to make a positive contribution to society. I don't know if there are many universities that manage to do those two things at the same time – be excellent, and at the same time be a very humane institution."

"The King isolates himself and becomes less and less accessible to our advice."

"You may want to, Sire, but then you will find someone other than me to carry out such a will."

"By the end of 1892, all the King's collaborators during the first and second phases of Belgian work in the Congo had therefore ceased to participate. M. van Eetvelde, who had increasingly isolated himself from them, remained alone in possession of the sovereign's confidence, with the sole program of being the passive instrument of his designs. This third phase of the administration of the state of Congo affected all signs of impending dissolution."

"Honest man, great citizen, modest servant of the country, who was always in pain, rarely in the spotlight, and who has not been replaced."

"A people needs air, broad horizons, an ideal which charms its imagination and makes its heart beat; reduce it to household calculations, to the politics of party interests, it will disintegrate and corrupt itself."

"From a moral point of view, there is a way to whitewash negroes, and to this view Africa undoubtedly presents the largest field that can be cultivated."

"I want it to be and it will be."

"My dear Mr. Banning, I am returning the 2nd sheet to you. I find this of extreme interest. You would have to read many volumes to acquire the geographical notions that you have so condensed into a few pages. I read this with great charm. You're giving the matter a nice boost. I have no comments to make. I made a small cross at the top of page 28, because I thought it was better to put "revise" instead of "revis" or "undertook" instead of "undertakes." A thousand friendships. (s) Jules Van Praet."

"Emile Banning was a young man who, like the king, had a limp and went on to create a furore as a romantic imperialist of the most dangerous sentimental kind. … Banning's liberalism was of the kind that sought to divide people into races, then formulate the true historical fate for each race, a belief that was already degenerating into a fertilizer that fueled the growth of racist fascism in Europe."

"The desert reveals its secrets; the great mystery of interior Africa is revealed day by day."

"The doctrine of state ownership of land established since 1890 is the exact opposite of free trade, the new doctrine is reprehensible, going against both the natural rights of the indigenous people who will be deprived, and the rights of the Imperial powers as determined in the act of Berlin."

"Wherever this regime has been applied in one form or another, it has led to economic stagnation and decline and political revolt."

"Everything seems to indicate that a decisive hour has sounded in the history of the world, the hour when an almost virgin continent and ignored races will cooperate in the work of humanity."

"It's my ruin you stipulate and you can't want it."

"Freedom of trade and navigation in the Congo Basin, exclusion from any differential treatment, assimilation of foreigners to nationals in civil and commercial terms, prohibition of entry rights for twenty years, condemnation of trafficking. There is only one downside: the African work does not have the international character that he would have liked."

"Emile Banning's ideology was based on "three noble principles": God, Freedom and Fatherland."

"The more we increase in numbers, the more we starve and become poorer. ... Either our population will shrink, or our territory will expand."

"Belgium only does pure philanthropy."

"The Christian inspiration from Chateaubriand and the love for nature underline Banning's romantic character. At the same time, Banning shared in the colonial ideology of Brialmont and Lambermont, which seemed rather based on a positivist principle: the 'struggle for life' of little Belgium. Emile Banning developed another positivist variant based on the inequality of races and peoples. Each race or people, which in the course of history had established a territory for itself, largely determined its historical fate, but could also suffer its fate. Banning thus formed a vision of history based on the organic needs of peoples. The Germanic race was at the same time the great example for Banning because of their growing self-esteem and romantic nation-building, and the great ogre, because their recent state growth could have negative territorial consequences for small Belgium."

"The King is no longer the same; the change of character and spirit observed in him for two or three years is accentuated and makes fear of a catastrophe, at a time when he had only to let it go to be a remarkable King, perhaps to become a large figure."

"For him to colonize was above all to civilize."

"The development of wavelets is an example where ideas from many different fields combined to merge into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The subject area of wavelets, developed mostly over the last 15 years, is connected to older ideas in many other fields, including pure and applied mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering."

"Mathematicians have various ways of judging the merits of new theorems and constructions. One very important criterion is esthetic — some developments just “feel” right, fitting, and beautiful. Just as in other venues where beauty or esthetics are discussed, taste plays an important role in this, but I think I am not alone in being especially excited when apparently different fields suddenly meet in a new concept, a new understanding. It is often of the sparks of such encounters that our esthetic enjoyment of mathematics is born. Another important criterion for according merit to some particular piece of mathematics is the extent to which it can be useful in applications; this is the criterion almost exclusively used by nonmathematicians."

"We present three recent developments in wavelets and subdivision: wavelet-type transforms that map integers to integers, with an application to lossless coding for images; rate-distortion bounds that realize the compression given by nonlinear approximation theorems for a model where wavelet compression outperforms the Karhunen-Loeve approach; and smoothness results for irregularly spaced subdivision schemes, related to wavelet compression for irregularly spaced data."

"... In their mathematical aspect, wavelets are rooted in the use of dilations and convolutions in Calderón-Zygmund theory in harmonic analysis. ... Algorithmically, wavelets are related to subband filtering in electrical engineering. Subband filtering was developed from the 70-s on; exact reconstruction procedures were discovered in the early 80-s. These were obviously fast algorithms, meant as a front-end processing step before encoding or compressing information in various types of signals. A lot of effort went into optimizing the filters for various applications, and this subfield of electrical engineering is now quite mature. ... Another algorithmic ancestor of wavelets are the multiple algorithms in numerical analysis, closer to mathematics, but still ad hoc."

"The wavelet transform is a tool that cuts up data or functions or operators into different frequency components, and then studies each component with a resolution matched to its scale. Forerunners of this technique were invented independently in pure mathematics (Calderón's resolution of the identity in harmonic analysis—see e.g., Calderón (1964), physics (coherent states for the (ax + b)-group in quantum mechanics, first constructed by Aslaksen and Klauder (1968), and linked to the hydrogen atom Hamiltonian by Paul (1985)) and engineering (QMF filters by Esteban and Galland (1977), and later QMF filters with exact reconstruction property by Smith and Barnwell (1986), Vetterli (1986) in electrical engineering; wavelets were proposed for the analysis of seismic data by J. Morlet (1983)). The last five years have seen a synthesis between all these different approaches, which has been very fertile for all the fields concerned."

"I was interested in truth from the point of view of salvation just as much as in truth from the point of view of scientific certainty. It appeared to me that there were two paths to truth, and I decided to follow both of them."

"The primaeval atom"

"I have too much respect for God to make it a scientific hypothesis."

"We want a fireworks theory of evolution. The last two thousand million years are slow evolution: they are the smoke and ashes of bright but very rapid fireworks."

"There is no conflict between science and religion."

"The BEH mechanism operates within the context of gauge theories. Despite the fact that grand unification schemes reach scales comparable to the Planck scale, there was, a priori, no indication that Yang-Mills fields offer any insight into quantum gravity. The only approach to quantum gravity that had some success, in particular in the context of a quantum interpretation of the black hole entropies, are the superstring theory approaches and the possible merging of the five perturbative approaches (Type IIA, IIB, Type I and the two heterotic strings) into an elusive M-theory whose classical limit would be 11-dimensional supergravity."

"Three distinct geometries on S7 arise as solutions of the classical equations of motion in eleven dimensions. In addition to the conventional riemannian geometry, one can also obtain the two exceptional Cartan-Schouten compact flat geometries with torsion."