Michael Kirby Quotes

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

I am a programmer.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

Software makes the world go round.

The best computer scientists are...technologists who crave beauty.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world-the hardware-plays the role of a gigantic computer.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.

No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

Data is not useful until it becomes information.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

Before information age, living standards basically were flat. Since then, they've been growing 2 percent a year were about 30 times richer. So technology, machines is really, you know, arguably the most important thing that's happened to humanity in terms of our living standards. You could look to the introduction of digital computers in the 1950s.

I am full of admiration for the technologists who have developed all sorts of gadgets for the purpose of improving communications. However, I believe that all these fascinating machines are complementary to, and not substitutes for, books and the printed word.

I don't own a computer. I've never seen anything online at all - nothing. I don't own a word processor. I have none of that stuff. It's not an act of rebellion. I'm just not a gadget person.