English Mathematician Quotations

To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.

A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

That justice should be administered between men, it is necessary that testimonies of fact be alleged; and that witnesses should apprehend themselves greatly obliged to discover the truth, according to their conscience, in dark and doubtful cases.

Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

Whence it is somewhat strange that any men from so mean and silly a practice should expect commendation, or that any should afford regard thereto; the which it is so far from meriting, that indeed contempt and abhorrence are due to it.

By the new year of 1994, it had grown up into Inform 4 and could produce games twice as large.

There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.

It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that some portion of the neglect of science in England, may be attributed to the system of education we pursue.

Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!

If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.

I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.

Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

The place of my birth, and residence for nearly sixteen years, in the early part of my life, became endeared to my feelings and affections; and more especially so after I had quitted it for an unknown place, and to associate with strangers.

Men do truly more render themselves despicable than others when, without just ground, or reasonable occasion, they do attack others in this way.

I have been working on a more serious game, called 'Jigsaw', for about 18 months, but don't hold your breath. it'll be a while arriving.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

Here was a problem, that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.

I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep.

Remember that 'Curses', being free, is circulated much more widely than shareware games, so it gets more than its fair share of attention.

When a mass of matter is to be removed a certain force must be expended; and upon the proper economy of this force the price of transport will depend.

With 'Curses,' I had a rough design in mind already, and in about a fortnight had the attics, the Unreal City and the garden fleshed out.

The public, who consume the new commodity or profit by the new invention, are much better judges of its merit than the government can be.

We feel there is already widespread broadband available today.

Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Another contrivance for regulating the effect of machinery consists in a vane or fly, of little weight, but presenting a large surface.

The single biggest is to stop the player from getting stuck and getting bored; always think like the player as well as the designer.

It's frequently over-praised now, and I've enjoyed watching a generation of 'angry young men' critics beginning to say, well what's so good?

Once the announcements were actually heard, there was a slow but gathering response. by the end of the first year, an avalanche.

The force of vapour is another fertile source of moving power; but even in this case it cannot be maintained that power is created.

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.