| (757) 683-5295 |
| (757) 683-3885 |
| lluo@odu.edu |
| Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
Old Dominion University Engineering & Computational Science Building 4700 Elkhorn Ave. Norfolk, VA 23529, USA |
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." (Life on the Mississippi)
"In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language." (The Innocents Abroad)
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong."
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world!"
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
"It is one thing to treat your facts with imagination. It is quite another to image your facts."
"One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perseveringly during 55 years: that word is FAILURE."
"Science is the record of dead religions."
"There is physics and there is postage stamp collecting."
"No investigation can [strictly] be called scientific unless it admits a mathematical demonstration."
"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."
"It takes more time to scotch falsehood and expose fables than it does to set forth something solid and new."
"Thus I have come before you with a purpose. Some years
hence, when tonight's initiates are deans and vice-presidents, the
persons whose names I have mentioned may well be retired or dead in mind
if not in body. I ask those deans and vice-presidents, remembering what
I have said tonight, to give a chance to the queer and arrogant young
man without a laboratory and without a computing machince who claims he
can do research in mechanics just by THINKING."
[in "Recent Advances in Rational Mechanics", Science Vol. 127 (1958)]
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."
"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
"Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself."
[Sex and Character]