"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man's inability to understand the exponential function."
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Reported in Paul G. Hewitt, Conceptual Physics: A New Introduction to Your Environment, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1981) ch. 9, p. 160, footnote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett
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Albert Allen Bartlett
Albert Allen Bartlett (March 21, 1923 – September 7, 2013) was an American professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. By July 2001, he had lectured over 1,742 times since September 1969 on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy". Bartlett regarded the word combination "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, and argued that modest annual percentage population increases could lead to exponential growth. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as the greatest challenge facing human
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