Doron Zeilberger

1950– · Israeli mathematician

Topics: mathematics, programming, simplicity, history of computing

• Many of the successes of `fancy' mathematics are due to sociological and linguistic reasons. They are really high-school-algebra arguments in disguise.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• When a problem seems intractable, it is often a good idea to try to study "toy" versions of it in the hope that as the toys become increasingly larger and more sophisticated, they would metamorphose, in the limit, to the real thing.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Math is perfect (in principle), but mathematicians are not (because they are humans), hence the mathematics that (human) mathematicians do is influenced by the weltanschauung of the people around them.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Mathematics my foot! Algorithms are mathematics too, and often more interesting and definitely more useful.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Let me also remind you that zero, like all of mathematics, is fictional and an idealization. It is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature or to get perfect vacuum. Luckily, mathematics is a fairyland where ideal and fictional objects are possible.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Algorithms existed for at least five thousand years, but people did not know that they were algorithmizing. Then came Turing (and Post and Church and Markov and others) and formalized the notion.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics.

  — Doron Zeilberger