“People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians.”

Foreword to Teichmüller Theory

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William Thurston4

mathematician 1946–2012

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the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates. <br class="br">Turing Award Lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969) http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/TuringLecture/TuringLecture.html, in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2) (April 1970)

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“People can be fooled into thinking of mathematics as logical, formal, symbolic reasoning. But this is far from reality...computers are far better at formal computation and formal reasoning, but humans are far better mathematicians.”

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William Thurston4

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