“The best way to do that is with… reagents that probably don’t
exist, which is why that’s not such a great way to do that.”
(after finishing his presentation) “Why is everyone watching me?”
“He went to Switzerland and took injections of baboon prostates.
Then he wrote these poems.” on Wordsworth
“Titanic is just Romeo and Juliet. And an iceberg.”
“Even if we think ‘that man has a cork up his butt,’ we don’t _say_ it…”
Subject: 8.08 Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics
“There are (N + f - 1)! / [N! (f - 1)!] ways to permute my balls.”
Subject: 8.04 Quantum Mechanics
“By geometry, … [pause] … Well, just by looking at it actually.”
Subject: ASU CSC210 Data Structures
“We want to take these components and see if we can grope them–er,
group them into sets”.
Subject: 8.08 Statistical and Quantum Physics
“The partition function is an animal which was invented in chapter 6.
It is not a fundamental animal, but it is a convenient animal.”
“Tarzan knew E=3NkT even before Einstein. Jane didn’t know; he had to
tell her … that’s what marriage is all about.” (after a long discussion of how even in the jungle you need to know about specific heats so that you can warm up your coconut milk)
“The partition function has to be clear to you. . . like honey has to be
clear. Or maple syrup. It will work much better if you think of it as
maple syrup.”
“When multiple metal atoms get together, their valence electrons run
wild, like kids in a hippie commune.”
I won’t give you a transparent proof. I’ll give you the most obscure proof I can find.
That’s outside the scope of this course. That’s in the next course, which you won’t take.
This is a true fact, like all facts.
How many people don’t know omega is the cube-root of unity?
That’s a lie; I just told you.
When something is beautiful and elegant, it is of no help in actual computation.
“F” isn’t a function anymore. It’s just the letter that comes after “e”.
"A finite plane is a very good approximation to an infinite plane."
"My efforts to simplify it have led to complexifying it."
"OK. I'll work on it, and you'll work on it, and we'll discuss it when it's too late.''
"It looks like the hypothesis has nothing to do with the solution. That makes a good theorem."
"Where the pressure is a maximum, the displacement is zero. On the other hand, where the displacement is zero, the pressure is a maximum."
Set theory is ... the kind of muddy water where logicians like to swim.
However, it's a very infinite set.
Well, let’s just defer that. Maybe we’ll defer that off to infinity.
But of course that takes some thinking. So let’s omit proving that.
“At certain critical values of b, something terrible is going to happen.”
“These are Maxwell’s equations, and you can find them on any MIT t-shirt.”
“We do what mathematicians always do: we assume all physical constants are equal to 1. Well, except maybe the square root of 2 pi, but I usually assume the square root of 2 pi is equal to 1, too.”
“Let’s take a tube of toilet paper without the ends — often called a cylinder.”
(Trying to derive as much as he could without any actual calculation:) “Of course, at some point we have to know SOMETHING.”
“There is no motivation for doing what we’re going to do.” -before giving some twisted derivation
“Riemann wrote this in an eight-page paper around 100 years ago, and mathematicians have been trying to understand it ever since. Of course, it _was_ written in German…”
"Notice the nonobvious insensitivity of the rhs to reciprocating Y.” - Referring to the method of computing the average value of a function over a closed interval by integration…
“This is one of those things which you probably already understand but won’t after I’m finished explaining it.”
“We’ll call this one mu. Do you all know what mu is? If nothing, higher education gives you a deeper understanding of greek”
“The sum of the heights of eight Canadians is close enough to infinity…”
While discussing multivariable max/min problems: “It’s obvious that there’s a maximum…it’s obvious to me, anyway, and I’m giving the lecture.”
“Oh my god, it’s working!”
“All I’ve done is shrink it from its former greatness.”
“This is the only time during a lecture that I am going to show off.”
“I would like to summarize a hundred years of statistics in the next ten minutes. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“You can address each point separately byte by byte, er, bit by bit, by bytes…”
“logic programming: reducing programming to a previously unsolved problem.”
“I misunderstood your question, but it was a good one.”
“If not a biggest element, then certainly an element than which no other element is bigger.”
(clearly spoken by a computer science professor…) “In digital systems you have to take into account things that _almost_ work. And when I say `almost work’ I mean it doesn’t really work.”
This would be visible if it were visible, but it’s not.
“So a girl is like a system failure.” (while calculating the number of expected childern a couple would have before they had a girl)
Too much pipelineing is bad for the soul.
“There is a point I want to make.” *pause* “That was my point.”
“A linear cat is a cat that when you tug on this ear it says “meow,” and when you tug on the other ear it says “meow,” and when you tug on both ears it says it twice as loud. [...] There are no linear cats.”
“You may have noticed that I ran out of letters a while ago.”
“No hardcore math people here…?” “then I can get away with this.”
All of your hard work sometimes gets reduced to a good figure.
“Don’t worry, I can’t pass the exams either.”
“I’m not trying to say anything interesting.”
“Look - a review session is just like sex. You can tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you, or you can not tell me what you want, and you’ll just get screwed.”
Yea, long post, but i loved it!
