Yen Ling

“It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

“(Revised Sherlock Holmes quote) It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“But real-world questions aren't like word problems. A real-world problem is something like "Has the recession and its aftermath been especially bad for women in the workforce, and if so, to what extent is this the result of Obama administration policies?" Your calculator doesn't have a button for this. Because in order to give a sensible answer, you need to know more than just numbers. What shape do the job-loss curves for men and women have in a typical recession? Was this recession notably different in that respect? What kind of jobs are disproportionately held by women, and what decisions has Obama made that affect that sector of the economy? It's only after you've started to formulate these questions that you take out the calculator. But at that point the real mental work is already finished. Dividing one number by another is mere computation; figuring out what you should divide by what is mathematics.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“Math gives us a way of being unsure in a principled way: not just throwing up our hands and saying "huh", but rather making a firm assertion: "I'm not sure, this is why I'm not sure, and this is roughly how not sure I am." Or even more: "I'm unsure, and you should be too.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking