There would be the need to try and kill as many as possible of the scientists, technicians, engineers, mathematicians who are involved in the process because, in some ways, one sets back a program much more by killing the personnel.

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders while computer scientists stand on each other's toes.

We have to have the best education system in the world. We need mathematicians, engineers and scientists to develop the products and processes of the future, and frankly, we're not doing that.

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.