Notation Quotes - page 2
The Rule of Three, or Golden Rule of Arithmeticall whole Numbers. Be the three termes given 2 3 4. ...To finde their fourth proporcionall Terme: that is to say, in such Reason to the third terme 4, as the second terme 3, is to the first terme 2 [Modern notation: \frac{x}{4} = \frac{3}{2}]. ...Multiply the second terme 3, by the third terme 4, & giveth the product 12: which dividing by the first terme 2, giveth the Quotient 6: I say that 6 is the fourth proportional terme required.
Simon Stevin
An edition is... still wanted which shall, while in some places adhering... to the original text, at the same time be so entirely remodelled by the aid of accepted modern notation as to be thoroughly readable by any competent mathematician, and this want it is the object of the present work to supply.
Thomas Little Heath
Here, in the last pages of the "Abegg" Variations, Schumann plays the motto theme A-B-E-G-G (B in German notation is the English Bb) not by sounding the last four notes but by taking them away, one by one, from, the chord of Bb-E-G. This is the first time in history that a melody is signified not by the attack but by the release of a series of notes. The motto, however, ends with a repeated final G. If the motto is played by releasing each successive note, we are faced with a paradox: when the G is released once on the piano, it is no longer there to be released again-the motto is not only unplayable as conceived but unimaginable. Schumann signifies as much by another paradox: he adds accents to the sustained notes.
Charles Rosen
In all engineering disciplines nowadays, software engineering excluded, there exists an established engineering process to develop a system, which is accompanied by a number of suited modeling description techniques. Software engineering, being a rather new field, has not as yet established any clear methodical guidance or a fully standardized modeling notation.
Bernhard Rumpe
Graphical design notations have been with us for a while... their primary value is in communication and understanding. A good diagram can often help communicate ideas about a design, particularly when you want to avoid a lot of details. Diagrams can also help you understand either a software system or a business process. As part of a team trying to figure out something, diagrams both help understanding and communicate that understanding throughout a team. Although they aren't, at least yet, a replacement for textual programming languages, they are a helpful assistant... Of these graphical notations, the UML's importance comes from its wide use and standardization within the OO development community. The UML has become not only the dominant graphical notation within the OO world but also a popular technique in non-OO circles.
Martin Fowler
The idea that beauty is revolution is a revelation to me. I once believed that the concept of the music was more important than the sound, that the politics of the notation was more important than the time limits of the rehersals and therefore, more important than the sound of the performance.
Beth Anderson
I've rediscovered the part of my brain that can't decode anything, that can't add, that can't work from a verbalized concept, that doesn't care about stylish notation, that makes melodies that have pitch and rhythm, that doesn't know anything about zen eternity and gets bored and changes, that isn't worried about being commercial or avant-garde or serial or any other little category. Beauty is enough.
Beth Anderson
Wittgenstein's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft, of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every culture is vindicated. One never knew that could be done - and so quickly too! It is that above all which endows his philosophy with such a capacity to attract and to repel. His mystique of consensual custom denies that anything can sit in judgment of our concepts, that some may be more rational and others less so. So all of them are in order and have nothing to fear from philosophy, as indeed he insists. This is a fairly mild form of irrationalism, invoking no fierce dark Gods, merely a consensual community. It is the Soft Porn of Irrationalism.
Ernest Gellner
It is not that I do not approve it, but all his propositions could be proved in the usual, regular Archimedian way in many fewer words than this book [Arithmetica Infinitorum] contains. I do not know why he has preferred this method with algebraic notation to the older way which is both more convincing and more elegant.
John Wallis
How do heavy bodies fall? ...Galileo's investigation of dynamics was physical; Aristotle's was metaphysical. But unlike Galileo, we have the additional convenience of algebraic notation. Had it been invented in his day he would certainly have known it; almost certainly he would have been able to push his development of dynamics much farther.
Galileo Galilei
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem-just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc. Poets have used such indicators long before modernism-Dickinson's dashes and capitals are one example. Contemporary composers have also expanded on classical notation with new, self-invented markings. You want to find a way that is not random or chaotic but allows for various renderings of a line, a punctuation of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to several physical systems, including dye molecules. ... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser. Furthermore, Feynman made accessible Dirac's quantum notation via his thought experiments on two-slit interference with electrons.
Richard Feynman
