It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.

— Richard Feynman, New Textbooks for the "New" Mathematics (1965)

Source: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2362/1/feynman.pdf

Printed in Engineering and Science (March 1965); a paraphrase of this passage reads "Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem."

Topics: mathematics