If You Tell Me Precisely What It

Problems Are Often Stated In Vague Terms... Because It Is Quite Uncertain What The Problems Really Are.

Truth Is Much Too Complicated To Allow Anything But Approximations.

The Sciences Do Not Try To Explain, They Hardly Even Try To Interpret, They Mainly Make Models. By A Model Is Meant A Mathematical Construct Which, With The Addition Of Certain Verbal Interpretations, Describes Observed Phenomena. The Justification Of Such A Mathematical Construct Is Solely And Precisely That It Is Expected To Work-that Is, Correctly To Describe Phenomena From A Reasonably Wide Area.

By And Large It Is Uniformly True In Mathematics That There Is A Time Lapse Between A Mathematical Discovery And The Moment When It Is Useful; And That This Lapse Of Time Can Be Anything From 30 To 100 Years, In Some Cases Even More; And That The Whole System Seems To Function Without Any Direction, Without Any Reference To Usefulness, And Without Any Desire To Do Things Which Are Useful.

When We Talk Mathematics, We May Be Discussing A Secondary Language Built On The Primary Language Of The Nervous System.