John G. Kemeny famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.
-- John G. Kemeny

#Science #Men #Civilization
...it is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him.
-- John G. Kemeny

#Teacher #Math #Achievement
If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.
-- John G. Kemeny

#Distance #Learning #Views
The only reason psychology students don't have to do more and harder mathematics than physics students is because the mathematicians haven't yet discovered ways of dealing with problems as hard as those in psychology.
-- John G. Kemeny

#Psychology #Way #Students
A considreable portion of my high school trigonometry course was devoted to the solution of oblique triangles... I have still not had an excuse for using my talents for solving oblique triangles. If a professional mathematician never uses these dull techniques in a highly varied career, why must all high school students devote several weeks to the subject?
-- John G. Kemeny

#School #Careers #Technique

If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
The youthful brain should in general not be burdened with things ninety-five percent of which it cannot use and hence forgets again... In many cases, the material to be learned in the various subjects is so swollen that only a fraction of it remains in the head of the individual pupil, and only a fraction of this abundance can find application, while on the other hand it is not adequate for the man working and earning his living in a definite field.
There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back
God wants us to speak to men so that they will feel it, so that they will never forget it. God means every Christian to be effective, to make a difference in the actual records and results of Christian work. God put each of us here to be a power. There is not one of us but is an essential wheel of the machinery and can accomplish all that God calls us to.
If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

John G. Kemeny famous quotes

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