Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers.” This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “ harmonic mean”
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
James Clear • Highlights From jamesclear.com
What everybody knows is this only. That there is repetition in nature.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.
John Brockman • This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (Edge Question Series)
The lesson is very much in line with Thurston’s remark that “The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.”
David Bessis • Mathematica
We accepted equilibrium because it is so analytically useful, but it gives us a Platonic universe. It’s beautiful, and ideal, and pristine, and lovely, but it’s not really real.
W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
The promise, like the wheel, is unknown in Nature: and is the first mark of man.