John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (pp. 37-38; ellipsis represents elision of examples)
Source: Michaelmas (1977), Chapter 10 (p. 153)
John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician
Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (pp. 37-38; ellipsis represents elision of examples)
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
The Phoenix, a Linguistic Phenomenon, ch. 1
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer
Word Play (1974)
Context: Whorf asked... Do the Hopi and European cultures... conceptualize reality in different ways? And his answer was that they do. Whereas European cultures are organized in terms of space and time, the Hopi culture, Whorf believed, emphasizes events. To speakers of European languages, time is a commodity that occurs between fixed points and can be measured. Time is said to be wasted or saved... their economic systems emphasize wages paid for the amount of time worked, rent for the time a dwelling is occupied, interest for the time money is loaned. Hopi culture... instead thinks... The span of time the growing takes is not the important thing, but rather the way in which the event of growth follows the event of planting. The Hopi is concerned that the sequence of events in the construction of a building be in the correct order, not that it takes a certain amount of time to complete the job.
Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer
Source: The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981), p. 148-149
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst
Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 8
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director
"Alphabet" [Alfabet] from "Five Children's Songs" (1934), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 239
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)
“Literature is analysis after the event.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer
Quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, ed. Michael Horovitz (1969): Afterwords, section 2
“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Source: Collected Fictions
Balachandra Rajan (1920–2009) Indian writer
The Overwhelming Question ' University of Toronto Press 1976