Alonzo Church Quotes
I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.
Church, Alonzo. Interview by William Aspray. 17 May 1984. The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s, Transcript no. 5, Princeton University, 1985.
Feynman generally emphasized the importance of a scientist understanding the mathematics of his/her subject, especially where nature's complexities abounded. At the time few appreciated the importance in the biological sciences of mathematics which we know today is so essential.
There are many systems of mathematics which are totally contrary to the world as we know and observe it; others, reflect the world as it is known. The latter we use for science. The former exist only in the mathematics world. We have mathematics today of computers that do not exist, universes that can only be imagined and some that are not even imaginable. Sometimes we realize that a mathematical system we thought had no reflection of reality, was really useful in explaining a new physical phenomenon. What is theoretical today, might need to be applied tomorrow.
Politicians, like many other people, often confuse correlation with causality as few have studied or understand the mathematics of probability.
For many scientists, this is the goal of each area of inquiry. For others, the science is crude and really not understood unless the mathematical model exists and can be verified experimentally. For Thompson, this was the difference between understanding and not.
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language (see e.g. Church 1970).
