If you use a computer to solve a mathematical problem,
it is because you don't know the answer.
When the computer returns a solution,
how do you know the solution it returns is the answer to your problem?
If the brain were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple to understand it.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to
beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with
everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very
foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be
given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And
the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet", Stephen Mitchell Translation
"In what manner the mathematicians are convicted of professing a vain science?"
Saint Augustine, "The City of God," Book V, Section 5,
Random House, New York, 1950, pp. 147.
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians
and all those who make empty prophesies.
The danger exists that mathematicians
have made a covenant with the devil to darken
the spirit and confine man to the bonds of hell.
Saint Augustine, "Confessions"
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Email:
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Weldon A. Lodwick (Editor and contributor),
CRC Press,
Taylor & Francis Group, 2008.
CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
167 pp.
ISBN 13: 978-0-8493-6395-5 (Hardcover),