the ħive

Cause I’ve got the brains, they’re there in my head
All that remains is just to get out of bed
I’m missing the best part of the day
Stealing tomorrow to help me get over today

— The Fratellis, “Lazybones”

The Chuck Norris of mathematics.

http://www.gaussfacts.com/

• When Gauss died, he did not leave any conjectures but exercises.
• Gauss knows the last digit of pi.
• Erdos believed God had a book of all perfect mathematical proofs. God believes Gauss has such a book.
• Fermat once made Gauss angry. The result - Fermat’s Last Theorem.
• The common phrase used by mathematicians, “Let n be an integer”, is literally a request to Gauss to allow it to be so.
• Gauss didn’t discover the normal distribution, nature conformed to his will.
• Gauss doesn't understand stochastic processes because he can predict random numbers.

Some select quotes.

• The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
• All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
• The good ended happily and the bad―unhappily. That is what fiction is.
• Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
• “How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.”
  “Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get in my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.”
• My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!
• To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up.
• I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
• In any case, she is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair.
• “Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy! You never talk anything but nonsense.”
  “Nobody ever does.”
• He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of that kind.
• “Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”
  “I can, for I feel that you are sure to change.”

Oscar Wilde, 1895