Quotes & Sayings About Notation

Upon finding the letter, I had one of those out of body experiences that come only after poring over archival material for nine hours straight, most of it dull as dust, but then something like this appears and you look around at the two or three other glaze-eyed researchers and want to go around the room and give everyone a high-five, but instead you just get up and quietly go to the water fountain, then make a notation for photocopy, and crack the next folder. — Jay Kirk

Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so. — Marc-Andre Hamelin

The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Sometimes he wrote equations, or musical notation, sometimes he wrote in Latin; he refused to tell her what it was about. "Nothing," he said. "I have nothing important or original to say, yet I feel compelled to express myself, so I just write it down and let it go. — Gwendolen Gross

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation. — Harrison Birtwistle

Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents ... As a result, the parent today isa maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read. — Kenneth Keniston

Black is now in desperate need of a good idea. Or, to put it standard chess notation, +- — Mark Dvoretsky

It should be pointed out that none of Cardew's works ever gave total freedom to the performer. The instructions were a guide which focused each individual's creative instinct on a problem to be solved - how to interpret a particular system of notation using one's own musical background and attitudes. — John Tilbury

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. — Adrienne Rich

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation. — Niklaus Wirth

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour. — Gottfried Leibniz

Imagine someone so infatuated by a band that they have every different pressing of every album the band made. Most of the time, the only difference in the album is the matrix number or a different 'made in' notation on the back cover or label. This is enough to make some people extremely excited. Actually, much more than excited. — Henry Rollins

Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn't here. — Helen Macdonald

All right," he said. "Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops." He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. "See," he said, "using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind's default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis." His chalk flew across the board again. "Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness ... — Robert J. Sawyer

The process of putting intangible thoughts into an imperfect system of notation - which is difficult enough, depending on your ideas - acquaints you with how best to express your ideas so that it is as clear as possible to the performer. — Marc-Andre Hamelin

In fact, they didn't even keep track of birth dates here. Instead, they used a traditional method of counting a person's age. Newborn babies were "one year old," and became one year older at the start of the new year. As for the reason it didn't start at zero... I was briefly afraid I'd discover they didn't yet have the concepts of zero or place-value notation. In fact, they had both. Newborn babies being "one" was just a holdover from previous times, before the numeral "zero" existed within their culture. Old — Kanata Yanagino

The difference between the detailed plans he drew up and the house itself when finished, so filled with raked sea light, is the difference between the body and the soul, between musical notation and a song, between the idea for a drawing and the actual drawing itself. — Colm Txf3ibxedn

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended. — John Cage

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage's Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly. — Ada Lovelace

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for. — Harold Budd

Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. [ ... ] The proliferation of programming languages shows no more uniformity than mathematics. Nevertheless, programming languages do bring a different perspective. [ ... ] Because of their application to a broad range of topics, their strict grammar, and their strict interpretation, programming languages can provide new insights into mathematical notation. — Kenneth E. Iverson

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. — Lynne Truss

Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician. — Kenneth E. Iverson

A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher. — Bertrand Russell

Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it. — Charles Babbage

As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation. — Franz Liszt

It is possible, of course, to operate with figures mechanically, just as it is possible to speak like a parrot: but that hardly deserves the names of thought. It only becomes possible at all after the mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak. — Gottlob Frege

Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The whole purport of literature ... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. — Thornton Wilder

There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton's physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula. — George Boole

Ask yourself whether our language is complete
whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall. — Marilynne Robinson

I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen's, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell's equations. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon. — David Mitchell

The main reason for the break was a combination of travel and going back to university, which drew me into theatre more than music. I did stuff on acoustic guitar when I was traveling, filed it away and made notes, without it being musical notation. Just taped the odd thing, did a sketch, stuck it on a cassette. I thought at some point, I'll go back to it. Some of it I did use in '84-'85 when I started working in the Free Theatre in Christchurch. So it might seem like I had given up after the Pin Group, but I just went into a different avenue. — Roy Montgomery

Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin. — Annie Dillard

What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages. — Alan W. Watts

This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around. — Jim Blinn

I nodded and made a notation on my legal pad. It read Got you, motherfucker. — Michael Connelly

For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread - the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation in the margin of a draft - until the day when even the most devoted portraitist of the dead says, "Enough!" Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible - resurrection. — Laura Furman

Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world. — Alan W. Watts

The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Your remarks upon chemical notation with the variety of systems which have arisen, &c., &c., had almost stirred me up to regret publicly that such hindrances to the progress of science should exist. I cannot help thinking it a most unfortunate thing that men who as experimentalists & philosophers are the most fitted to advance the general cause of science & knowledge should by promulgation of their own theoretical views under the form of nomenclature, notation, or scale, actually retard its progress. — Michael Faraday

Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks - that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information. — William J. Bernstein

I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation. — Robert A. Heinlein

One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations. — Ada Lovelace

Jenny's admonition had the desired effect. Ned drew a deep breath and thrust his arm gingerly into the bag, his mouth puckered in distaste. The expression on his face flickered from queasy horror to confusion. From there, it
flew headlong into outright bafflement. Shaking his head, he pulled his fist from the bag and turned his hand palm up.
For a long moment, the two men stared at the offending lump. It was brightly colored. It was round. It was
"An orange?" Lord Blakely rubbed his forehead. "Not quite what I expected." He scribbled another notation.
"We live in enlightened times," Jenny murmured. — Courtney Milan

Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations. — Ned Rorem

To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect. — Evan Parker

It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. [ ... ] Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make it seem harder to learn because of the many properties it suggests for exploration. — Kenneth E. Iverson

When I write a paper, I change my notation much more than I change my concepts. — Leslie Lamport

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. — Ellsworth Kelly

There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories. — Kai Nielsen

Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels. — Murray Gell-Mann

Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval — Judith Shulevitz

The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating. — Cornelius Cardew

During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible. — Niklaus Wirth

The question undoubtedly is, or soon will be, not whether or no we shall employ notation in chemistry, but whether we shall use a bad and incongruous, or a consistent and regular notation. — William Whewell

If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization. — Kenneth E. Iverson

The page on which I wrote is the second page in section 19 of the Doctrine and Covenants, in the old edition of the triple combination. On the bottom of the page, in capital letters, is written the word REPENTANCE. And then an arrow leads to a notation that reads: Greek word. To have a new mind. — Henry B. Eyring

A second technician gauges Werner's eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed. Werner's color is himmelblau, sky blue. To assess his hair color, the man snips a lock of hair from Werner's head and compares it to thirty or so other locks clipped to a board, arrayed darkest to lightest. "Schnee," the man mutters, and makes a notation. Snow. Werner's hair is lighter than the lightest color on the board. — Anthony Doerr

The initial motive for developing APL was to provide a tool for writing and teaching. Although APL has been exploited mostly in commercial programming, I continue to believe that its most important use remains to be exploited: as a simple, precise, executable notation for the teaching of a wide range of subjects. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation. — Simon Blackburn

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? — Madeleine Thien

But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the "feel" of it, and copying him, and this enables him to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz artists who use the same approach. — Alan W. Watts

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. — Alfred North Whitehead

The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation. — William Monahan

The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine ... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. — Ada Lovelace

With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation. — Kenneth E. Iverson

We are all an instrument with a special notation to our individual identity. When you incorporate many beautiful notes together, you envelop a harmonious orchestra. — Steven Cuoco

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

We think of prices as simply the notation of how much we must pay for things. But the price system accomplishes far more than that. Hundreds of millions of people buying and selling, and abstaining from buying and selling, generate a system of signals - prices to producers and consumers about relative scarcities and demand. Through this system, consumers can convey to producers their subjective priorities and entrepreneurs can invest accordingly. — Sheldon Richman

Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers.

-Anonymous notation found inked in the margin of a manuscript history (believed to date to the time of Arthur Hawkwing) of the last days of the Tovan Conclaves — Robert Jordan

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort. — Elias Canetti

The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man." The fire storm at Dresden may have killed more people but not in so short a space of time. More than 100,000 men, women and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a million in all lost their homes. Two thousand tons of incendiaries delivered that punishment - in the modern notation, two kilotons. But the wind, not the weight of bombs alone, created the conflagration, and therefore the efficiency of the slaughter was in some sense still in part an act of God. — Richard Rhodes

A Composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated. — Cornelius Cardew

I don't mind that Bill Gates is a mega zillionaire; he's done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, e.g. the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field. — Jon Evans