Despite the unworldly nature of mathematics, mathematicians still have egos that need massaging. Nothing acts as a better drive to the creative process than the thought of the immortality bestowed by having your name attached to a theorem. The story of Selberg and Erdos highlights the importance in mathematics - indeed, in all of science - of credit and priority. That is why Wiles spent seven years alone in his attic working on Fermat’s Last Theorem. . . ~ Marcus du Sautoy Music of the Primes

Curiously or interestingly; Theorems post ancient times seemed to have been kicked off by Euclid? Heard of Pythagoras’s Theorem; but not of Euclid’s Theorem? At least not yet.

Mathematics, Connes declares, ‘is unquestionably the only universal language’. ~ Marcus du Sautoy Music of the Primes

The very idea that Mathematics is a Universal language let alone the only one….non-sense!!!
That’s not to say that mathematics can not be applied Universally.

Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. ~ Thomas Calryle

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes. ~ Maimonides

What we have thus far failed to grasp, are the lessons waiting to be learnt from abstract/technical languages:

Mathematics like a Swiss Army Knife can be applied to many things; Predicting outcomes.

Nothing is to wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature, an din such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency. ~ Michael Faraday

TEST: Use those techniques, not to predict, but to workout with accuracy & precision a big, BIG question: WHY:

Whatever the answer to the question WHY might or might not be, is academic. You don’t even have to think about or consider the answer to know, no matter what it is; IT’s product will be a QUESTION and it’s the answer to THAT question that can be worked out!!!


Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may as a rule be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. ~ Albert Einstein

Some facts are so simple that clever people can't accept them. ~ Robert Locke

All truths are easy to understand once they have been discovered; the point is to discover them. ~ Galilei Galileo


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Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Where is the information we have lost in data? It’s gone Digital!!! ~ T.S. Eliot Updated by Requote 2006 + 2008

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind. ~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. ~ Proverb

www.oed.com/about/

About the Oxford English Dictionary
The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

As the OED is a historical dictionary, its entry structure is very different from that of a dictionary of current English, in which only present-day senses are covered, and in which the most common meanings or senses are described first. For each word in the OED, the various groupings of senses are dealt with in chronological order according to the quotation evidence, i.e. the senses with the earliest quotations appear first, and the senses which have developed more recently appear further down the entry. In a complex entry with many strands, the development over time can be seen in a structure with several 'branches'.

www.oed.com/about/facts.html

Dictionary facts
First Edition

Proposed size: 4 volumes, 6,400 pages (with provision for ‘a larger dictionary containing not fewer than 10 volumes, each containing not less than 1,600 pages’)

Actual size: 10 volumes, 15,490 pages

Proposed time to complete: 10 years

Actual time to complete: 70 years (from approval date)

Publication date: 1884-1928 in 128 fascicles. Published in 10 volumes in 1928 and reissued in 12 volumes in 1933, with addition of one-volume Supplement

Price of fascicles: 12 shillings and sixpence for large sections

Price of bound volumes (1928): from 50 to 55 guineas for the set, depending on binding

Number of pages edited by James Murray: est., 7,200

Number of entries: 252,200

Number of word forms defined and/or illustrated: 414,800

Number of contributors (readers): est. 2,000

Number of quotations submitted by contributors: est. 5 million
Number of quotations used in Dictionary: 1,861,200

Number of authors represented in quotations: 2,700

Number of works represented in quotations: 4,500
Supplement (1972-1986)

Proposed size: one volume, 1,300 pages

Actual size: 4 volumes, 5,730 pages

Proposed time to complete: 7 years

Actual time to complete: 30 years

Publication date: vol. 1, 1972; vol. 2, 1976; vol. 3, 1982; vol. 4, 1986

Number of entries: 69,300

Number of quotations: est. 527,000
Second Edition (1989)

Proposed size: 20 volumes

Actual size: 20 volumes, 21,730 pages

Publication date: 1989

Weight of text: 62.6 kilos or 137.72 lbs.

Amount of ink used to print complete run: 2,830 kilos or 6,243 lbs.

Number of words in entire text: 59 million

Number of printed characters: 350 million

Number of different typographical characters used in text: approx.: 750 (660 special plus approx. 90 on regular keyboard)

Equivalent person years used to ‘key in’ text to convert to machine-readable form: 120

Equivalent person years to proof-read text: 60

Number of megabytes of electronic storage required for text: 540

Number of entries: 291,500

Number of main entries: 231,100

Number of main entries for obsolete words: 47,100

Number of main entries for spurious words: 240

Number of main entries for non-naturalized words: 12,200

Longest entry in Dictionary: the verb ‘set’ with over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000 characters

Number of cross-reference entries: 60,400

Number of cross-references within entries: 580,600

Number of word forms defined and/or illustrated: 615,100

Number of pronunciations: 139,900

Number of etymologies: 219,800

Number of quotations: 2,436,600

Most frequently quoted work (in various full and partial version, and translations): Bible (est. 25,000 quotations)

Most frequently quoted single author: Shakespeare (approx. 33,300 quotations)

Most frequently quoted single work of Shakespeare: Hamlet (almost 1,600 quotations)

Percentage of quotations by centuries:
20th century 20 per cent
19th century 31
18th century 11
17th century 16
16th century 10
15th century 4.5
14th century 3.5
13th century 1
1st to 12th centuries 1
Undated (see note) 0.5

Note: ‘Undated’ includes approximately 1,250 quotations from Beowulf, with the balance consisting of proverbs, nursery rhymes, ‘made up’ illustrations, and references to the appearance of word forms ‘in mod. Dicts.’

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The stone age was marked by man's clever use of crude tools; the information age, to date, has been marked by man's crude use of clever tools. ~ anon

A mind enclosed in language is in prison. ~ Simon Weil

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them. ~ Albert Einstein

Chicken Soup (There’s chicken soup and there’s Chicken Soup)!

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