John Dee Quotes
A marveilous newtrality have these things mathematicall, and also a strange participation between things supernaturall and things naturall.
Dee, John. The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara. John Daye, 1570.
See {234968} for an earlier, similar view.
This quotation is important because it illustrates a common problem politicians have with funding science and mathematical research. Actually, so far many millions of dollars have gone into studying and developing methods of producing random numbers and sequences of them which are extremely important to many branches of science and essential to the operation of computers. Yet to the layman, the expense of public money to find better ways to pick random numbers seems totally absurd. Just pick one or use any random number. However, it is virtually impossible for a human being to truly randomly pick a number from 1-999. Most methods produce biases which invalidate the randomness. But this is very counter intuitive. So much decision making about scientific funding and policy is counter intuitive to the politician and the general public.
Politicians, like many other people, often confuse correlation with causality as few have studied or understand the mathematics of probability.
He had just organized a new website, USAFacts, which took many of the numbers of government spending and economic descriptors of our society, and organzied them in a report. He was asked whether the website had a liberal or conservative point of view.
John Dee was an Anglo-Welsh mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated for the founding of English colonies in the New World to form a "British Empire", a term he is credited with coining.
