a famous 1959 essay, the physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner marveled at what he called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

de rigueur.

Maginot Line,

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Tycho Brahe’s

Richard Feynman said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”)

Claude Shannon,

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them. —Alfred North Whitehead

Learning is forgetting the details as much as it is remembering the important parts. Computers are the ultimate idiot savants: they can remember everything with no trouble at all, but that’s not what we want them to do.