“You see, some mathematicians have clear and far-ranging. "programs". For instance, Grothendieck had such a program for algebraic geometry; now Langlands has one for representation theory, in relation to modular forms and arithmetic. I never had such a program, not even a small size one.”

— Jean-Pierre Serre

An Interview with Jean-Pierre Serre - Singapore Mathematical Society https://sms.math.nus.edu.sg/smsmedley/Vol-13-1/An%20interview%20with%20Jean-Pierre%20Serre(CT%20Chong%20&%20YK%20Leong).pdf

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Jean-Pierre Serre2

French mathematician 1926

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“Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

“Langlands' life has been by no means as extravagant as Grothendieck's, but his romanticism is evident to anyone who reads his prose; the audacity of his program, one of the most elaborate syntheses of conjectures and theorems ever undertaken, has few equivalents in any field of scholarship.”

Michael Harris (1954) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation, 2015, p. 26

“Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense “softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century.”

Barry Mazur (1937) American mathematician

"WHAT IS...a Motive?" 2004

“Our foreign aid program is not growing in size, it is, on the contrary, smaller now than in previous years. It has had its weaknesses, but we have undertaken to correct them. And the proper way of treating weaknesses is to replace them with strength, not to increase those weaknesses by emasculating essential programs. Dollar for dollar, in or out of government, there is no better form of investment in our national security than our much-abused foreign aid program.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the Trade Mart in Dallas

“For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

1978 Turing Award Citation https://web.archive.org/web/20070708004814/http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4173633&srt=all&aw=140&ao=AMTURING. <br class="br">About

“I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. … they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.”

Grace Hopper (1906–1992) American computer scientist and United States Navy officer

As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X

“LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)… Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

John McCarthy (1979) " History of Lisp http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/lisp/lisp.html," as quoted in: Avron Barr, Edward Feigenbaum. The Handbook of artificial intelligence, Volume 2. Addison-Wesley, 1986. p. 5 <br class="br">1970s

“Hodge cohomology, algebraic de Rham cohomology, crystalline cohomology, the étale ℓ-adic cohomology theories for each prime number ℓ … A strategy to encapsulate all the different cohomology theories in algebraic geometry was formulated initially by Alexandre Grothendieck, who is responsible for setting up much of this marvelous cohomological machinery in the first place. Grothendieck sought a single theory that is cohomological in nature that acts as a gateway between algebraic geometry and the assortment of special cohomological theories, such as the ones listed above—that acts as the motive behind all this cohomological apparatus. …”

Barry Mazur (1937) American mathematician

"WHAT IS...a Motive?" 2004

“You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)] <br class="br">2010s

“The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. […] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.”

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) American computer scientist

The Synthesis of Algorithmic Systems, 1966

“You see, some mathematicians have clear and far-ranging. "programs". For instance, Grothendieck had such a program for algebraic geometry; now Langlands has one for representation theory, in relation to modular forms and arithmetic. I never had such a program, not even a small size one.”

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Jean-Pierre Serre2

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