Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: February 08, 2020 12:52PM
Thanks for the information on Martin Gardner. I wasn't aware of much of that. I think the very first book I ever bought was a collection mathematical puzzles he published in 1957. I stumbled across it a decade or so ago, and was surprised at the date. I also had to throw it out. The high acid cheap paper had basically eaten itself, and the pages were too brittle to turn.
Gardner got me reading his column in Scientific American, which got me reading the rest of the magazine, which gave me enough of a science background as a kid to start to seriously question the BoM and especially the BoA. Gardner, along with all the math programs thrown together in the US after the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, and an outstanding math teacher that I had for 10th thru 12th grade, was what got me into being a math major.
Some other quotes along the same lines that you might add you your repertoire:
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.
- Kurt Vonnegut (famously atheist)
This Vonnegut quote you will be less fond of. :)
Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
Another person, who if you are not familiar with him, you ought to be (by you, I mean anyone reading this)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_KnuthFrom the religion subheading of his wikipedia article:
In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth, a Lutheran,[30] is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated,[31] in which he examines the Bible by a process of systematic sampling, namely an analysis of chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. Each verse is accompanied by a rendering in calligraphic art, contributed by a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf. Subsequently, he was invited to give a set of lectures on his 3:16 project, resulting in another book, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, where he published the lectures "God and Computer Science".
He is arguably the godfather of Computer Science. He started on an epic series of books called The Art of Computer Programming (acknowledging it is at least as much art as science), a 7 volume magnum opus. He is in his late 80s, and still working on volume 4, which has turned out to be 3 hardcover volumes itself. So far. He still hopes to finish the series. I am doubtful. I jumped into the middle of computer science after my mission. It was a field that didn't even exist before my mission. "Knuth volume 1" as it was universally known was my baptism by fire. It was the text for my second course in CS.
He stopped writing those books temporarily because he felt typesetting software for printing mathematical text was awful, and there was no good software to aid people in designing fonts. He created TEX and MetaFont, now the 2 standard software packages in math typesetting, and font design. That was how he got to know so many calligraphers, and got into the 3:16 project, which he wrote about in some detail (including about his belief in God) in his book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About". I recommend the first book simply as a piece of thought-provoking art, and the second as a nontechnical introduction to a great mind.
He still lives in Palo Alto, and wanders over to Stanford now and then to hold forth. I suspect it is always an SRO crowd.
And now I am out of time, and will be gone all day. I will return to add my commentary on the quoted material from Gardner. The short version is summed up by my second Vonnegut quote above.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 02/08/2020 12:56PM by Brother Of Jerry.