the ħive

✒ Gauss facts

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.

✒ the importance of being earnest

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