Sublime

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.

Examples of Ruby expressions and the values to which they evaluate

mathematics was “inexhaustible”: there would always be new mathematical truths for the human mind to discover. If some could not be derived within the confines of a given formal system, that simply meant that human intuition was a more magnificent thing than what any machine could duplicate.

For the second time, the Ten-Count System had shown moderately heavy losses mixed with “lucky” streaks of the most dazzling brilliance. I learned later that this was a characteristic of a random series of favorable bets. And I would see it again and again in real life in both the gambling and the investment worlds.

Each notation renders certain operations, statements and thoughts about numbers simpler than others, and hence it embodies a theory about which relationships between numbers are useful or interesting.)

He computed exactly what the inclination of the chutes must be (he called it a coefficient of reversion) in order for intergenerational balance to be preserved,

Mathematicians call a sequence of numbers produced by a random process (such as those on our simulated stock chart) a random walk.