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John B.

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“alcoholic. To Quinn, for whom alcohol was a touchy simile, the truth was this: playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted. He”
― Monica Wood, The One-in-a-Million Boy

2 likes

“Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero Zero: An Acclaimed Political Thriller Unraveling Mussolini's Conspiracy, Media Hoaxes, and Italian History

55 likes

“If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation.”
― Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

tags: mathematics

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“Mathematicians aren’t people who find math easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

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“This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

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