miscellaneous

Interesting Concepts:

1. Occam’s razor

Beautiful Quotes: (unknown or falsely attributed authors are not included)

1. ‘Education Is Not the Learning of Facts, But the Training of the Mind To Think.’ — Einstein

2. ‘Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and number-theory the queen of mathematics.’ — Gauss

3. ‘In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.’ — Neumann

4. ‘Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’ — King

5. ‘Ask the right question is more significant than blindly try to solve a question.’ — Musk

6. ‘If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.’

7. ‘Two things could be equivalent, however they look very differently. Two things could be different, however they look very similar.’ — from propositional logic

8. ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.’ — Russell

Random thoughts:

1. For someone who knows optimization, what are some reasons to not apply the optimal strategy when solving daily tasks? First, the assumption is that, if we can convert a task into a single variable optimization problem, we consider the objective as THE goal. But the objective needs a reasonable justification, which is not easier than solving the problem. Second, if we resort to multivariable optimization, things get more interesting, in which case we could handle some trade-offs between different metrics. However, if the task is trivial, we probably want to spend more time on other beautiful parts of our lives.