
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
Letter to Louis Untermeyer (8 July 1915)
1910s
PROGRESS AND ITS SUSTAINABILITY http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ (1995 – )
1990s
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”
Letter to Louis Untermeyer (8 July 1915)
1910s
“No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”
Introduction
One Minute Nonsense (1992)
“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”
Source: The Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb
Source: 1910s, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 15.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 56e
“He who refuses nothing…will soon have nothing to refuse.”
XII, 79.
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)
“Those who do not know their history are doomed to keep stepping in it.”
This evokes the famous statement by George Santayana in The Life of Reason Vol. 1 (1905): "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)
The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
Letter to Frénicle (1657) Oeuvres de Fermat Vol.II as quoted by Edward Everett Whitford, The Pell Equation http://books.google.com/books?id=L6QKAAAAYAAJ (1912)
Context: There is scarcely any one who states purely arithmetical questions, scarcely any who understands them. Is this not because arithmetic has been treated up to this time geometrically rather than arithmetically? This certainly is indicated by many works ancient and modern. Diophantus himself also indicates this. But he has freed himself from geometry a little more than others have, in that he limits his analysis to rational numbers only; nevertheless the Zetcica of Vieta, in which the methods of Diophantus are extended to continuous magnitude and therefore to geometry, witness the insufficient separation of arithmetic from geometry. Now arithmetic has a special domain of its own, the theory of numbers. This was touched upon but only to a slight degree by Euclid in his Elements, and by those who followed him it has not been sufficiently extended, unless perchance it lies hid in those books of Diophantus which the ravages of time have destroyed. Arithmeticians have now to develop or restore it. To these, that I may lead the way, I propose this theorem to be proved or problem to be solved. If they succeed in discovering the proof or solution, they will acknowledge that questions of this kind are not inferior to the more celebrated ones from geometry either for depth or difficulty or method of proof: Given any number which is not a square, there also exists an infinite number of squares such that when multiplied into the given number and unity is added to the product, the result is a square.
" Last Chance to Think http://www.csicop.org/si/show/stephen_fry--last_chance_to_think/" Interview (2010) by Kylie Sturgess in Skeptical Inquirer. Vol 34 (1)
2000s