Amartya Sen Quotes
The Arab world is also the world that produced some of the greatest improvements in mathematics and in science. Even today, when a Princeton mathematician does an algorithm, he may not remember that "algorithm" derived from the name al-Khwarizmi, who is a ninth-century Arab mathematician.
Sen, Amartya. "Amartya Sen Extended Interview." Wide Angle, PBS, 2 Sept. 2003.
He is often called the “Father of Algebra” as the first person who actually wrote instructions for algebraic processes. At the time, Western mathematics was totally stagnant and intellectual development stifled by the Dark Ages and the Church.
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.
Amartya Kumar Sen CH is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of countries.
