Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

One finds limits by pushing them.

The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.