the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Am I really a good mathematician?

Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.