Sublime

There had been no greater card manipulator in the world than the American magician John Scarne, and Bond had spent long hours with his book, Scarne on Cards.

“This is the crux of science,” he’d say with enthusiasm. “All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction.” Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?

There’s a way to become good at math. This method is never taught in school. It doesn’t resemble any academic method and goes against the traditional tenets

He transformed probability from a gambler’s measure of frequency into a measure of informed belief.

“The whole trick is to know what variables to look at,” he wrote, “and then to know how to add.”

basic statistical processing with either proprietary

His original purpose was parochial: to automate the production of tables of mathematical functions such as logarithms and cosines, which were heavily used in navigation and engineering.

the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.