March 13, 2008 • 4:37 am 4
“Beauty is truth and truth beauty
That is all ye know on earth
And all ye need to know”
John Keats was 24 when he wrote those perspicacious lines. I cannot but wonder at what wisdom nature bestowed upon the child she claimed as her own, barely a year later.
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November 20, 2007 • 2:26 am 2
From D.E. Knuth’s famous letter to the United States Patent and Trademark Office:
“
I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.
Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.
Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It’s like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.
“
In those words of eloquent truth,
Beat Frost he did, Master Knuth.
Filed under: Computer Science, Poetry
October 3, 2006 • 3:59 am 0
A sovereign shame so elbows him: his own unkindness,
That stripp’d her from his benediction, turn’d her
To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights
To his dog-hearted daughters, these things sting
His mind so venomously, that burning shame
Detains him from Cordelia.
So reads a passage from King Lear by Shakespeare.
May 15, 2006 • 1:33 am 3
There were tears the day you went,
But I knew not what for to repent.
It was a loss for the best I knew,
Yet it was tough to bid you adieu.
Filed under: Human Memory, Poetry
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