Quotes About Notation

#1. All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

Ellsworth Kelly

#2. Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

Harold Budd

#3. When I write a paper, I change my notation much more than I change my concepts.

Leslie Lamport

#4. The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#5. This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.

Jim Blinn

#6. I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation.

Robert A. Heinlein

#7. One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.

Ada Lovelace

#8. The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#9. Sometimes he wrote equations, or musical notation, sometimes he wrote in Latin; he refused to tell her what it was about. "Nothing," he said. "I have nothing important or original to say, yet I feel compelled to express myself, so I just write it down and let it go.

Gwendolen Gross

#10. With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#11. The question undoubtedly is, or soon will be, not whether or no we shall employ notation in chemistry, but whether we shall use a bad and incongruous, or a consistent and regular notation.

William Whewell

#12. By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

Alfred North Whitehead

#13. We are all an instrument with a special notation to our individual identity. When you incorporate many beautiful notes together, you envelop a harmonious orchestra.

Steven Cuoco

#14. The page on which I wrote is the second page in section 19 of the Doctrine and Covenants, in the old edition of the triple combination. On the bottom of the page, in capital letters, is written the word REPENTANCE. And then an arrow leads to a notation that reads: Greek word. To have a new mind.

Henry B. Eyring

#15. The whole purport of literature ... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Thornton Wilder

#16. I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

Harrison Birtwistle

#17. I nodded and made a notation on my legal pad. It read Got you, motherfucker.

Michael Connelly

#18. It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. [ ... ] Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make it seem harder to learn because of the many properties it suggests for exploration.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#19. Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

#20. Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation.

Simon Blackburn

#21. In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.

David Mitchell

#22. Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#23. Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Ned Rorem

#24. My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

Niklaus Wirth

#25. Black is now in desperate need of a good idea. Or, to put it standard chess notation, +-

Mark Dvoretsky

#26. It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.

Gottfried Leibniz

#27. Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.

William Monahan

#28. The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating.

Cornelius Cardew

#29. Who would sup with the mighty must climb the path of daggers.

-Anonymous notation found inked in the margin of a manuscript history (believed to date to the time of Arthur Hawkwing) of the last days of the Tovan Conclaves

Robert Jordan

#30. Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks - that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information.

William J. Bernstein

#31. As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.

Franz Liszt

#32. During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible.

Niklaus Wirth

#33. To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect.

Evan Parker

#34. Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it.

Charles Babbage

#35. A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher.

Bertrand Russell

#36. If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#37. Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#38. The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#39. The difference between the detailed plans he drew up and the house itself when finished, so filled with raked sea light, is the difference between the body and the soul, between musical notation and a song, between the idea for a drawing and the actual drawing itself.

Colm Txf3ibxedn

#40. A Composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.

Cornelius Cardew

#41. The process of putting intangible thoughts into an imperfect system of notation - which is difficult enough, depending on your ideas - acquaints you with how best to express your ideas so that it is as clear as possible to the performer.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

#42. Clouds of linnets bounce, half-midges, half musical notation, along the hedges surrounding my old home, and all is out of sorts as far as that notion of home lies because my father isn't here.

Helen Macdonald

#43. Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

#44. The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

Elias Canetti

#45. Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval

Judith Shulevitz

#46. I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

John Cage