Random Favorite Quotes

• Bertrand Russell: Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
• Native American Proverb: We do not inherit the land from our ancestors but rather we borrow it from our children.
• David Foster Wallace: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
• George Orwell: By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad." But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
• Gian Carlo Rota: The Germans have aptly called Sitzfleisch the ability to spend endless hours at a desk doing grueling work. Sitzfleisch is considered by mathematicians to be a better gauge of success than any of the attractive definitions of talent with which psychologists regale us from time to time.
• Alan Watts: The more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery--in morals, arts or in spirituality--the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth of failure.
• William Blake:
  To see a world in a grain of sand
  And a heaven in a wild flower,
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
  And eternity in an hour.
  
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
  What is an epigram?
  A dwarfish whole;
  Its body brevity,
  and wit its soul.
  
• John Donne:
  No man is an island,
  Entire of itself.
  Each is a piece of the continent,
  A part of the main.
  If a clod be washed away by the sea,
  Europe is the less.
  As well as if a promontory were.
  As well as if a manor of thine own
  Or of thine friend's were.
  Each man's death diminishes me,
  For I am involved in mankind.
  Therefore, send not to know
  For whom the bell tolls,
  It tolls for thee.
  
• Alan Watts: We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
• Alan Watts: The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
• Yisong Yue: Massage from the side, do not aggress from the top. (on eating Szechuan Peanuts with chopsticks)
• Alan Watts: Insecure societies are most intolerant to non-joiners. They are so unsure of the validity of the game rules that they say "everyone must play."
  ...
  Individualism, rugged individualism always leads to conformism. Because people get scared. So they herd together, and compounded with industrial society of mass production etc. They all wear the same cloth, and they're sensible cloth that don't show the dirt too much.
• Bill Clinton: Politics gives guys so much power that they tend to behave badly around women. And I hope I never get into that.
• Manuel Blum: You know the jokes about PhD's... A PhD knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.
  When working on a PhD, you must focus on a topic so narrow that you can understand it completely. It will seem at first that you're working on the proverbial needle, a tiny fragment of the world, a minute crystal, beautiful but in the scheme of things, microscopic. Work with it. And the more you work with it, the more you penetrate it, the more you will come to see that your work, your subject, encompasses the world. In time, you will come to see the world in your grain of sand.
• George Orwell: I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
  "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
  Here it is in modern English:
  "Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
  This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
• George Orwell: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
• Voltaire: (in letter to Diderot) I am exceedingly anxious to meet and talk with you, whether you think yourself one of God's works, or a particle drawn, of necessity, from eternal and necessary matter. Whatever you are, you are a worthy part of that great whole which I do not understand.
• Arthur Schopenhauer: The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most bare-faced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity as a monument of German stupidity
• Unknown: (on the philosophy of David Hume and George Berkeley) No matter, never mind.
• Immanuel Kant: Metaphysics is a dark and endless ocean, without shores or lighthouses, strewn with many philosophical shipwrecks.
• Honore Mirabeau: For money Talleyrand would sell his soul--and he would be right, for he would be trading muck for gold.
• Will Durant: (on the late Roman Republic) The courts now rivaled the polls in corruption; oath had lost all worth as testimony and almost any verdict can be bought. Lentulus, having been acquitted by two votes, mourned the extra expenses he had gone to in bribing one more judge than he had needed.

Study Resources

(note: some of these notes are written by me and not rigorously checked for correctness)

• Arkadi Nemirovski has a great set of lecture notes on optimization.
• An Intuitive Guide to Transformation of Variables for Probability Density Functions
• An Approach toward Understanding Matrix Derivatives
• The Elements of Style is a fantastic short guide to good writing.

Courses Taught

Courses Taken