Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 4 proof by personal communication: 'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].' proof by reduction to the wrong problem: 'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.' proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. | |
| HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 5 proof by accumulated evidence: Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample. proof by cosmology: The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God. proof by mutual reference: In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A. proof by metaproof: A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques. | |
| Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop. Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes. | |
| Carswell's Corollary: Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature invariably comes up with a better mouse. | |
| Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law: When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will. | |
| Correspondence Corollary: An experiment may be considered a success if no more than half your data must be discarded to obtain correspondence with your theory. | |
| Fifth Law of Applied Terror: If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book. Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live. | |
| Fine's Corollary: Functionality breeds Contempt. | |
| Fourth Law of Applied Terror: The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria. Corollary: Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course. | |
| Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done. | |
| Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists. Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization. | |
| Law of Selective Gravity: An object will fall so as to do the most damage. Jenning's Corollary: The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter. | |
| Scott's First Law: No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right. Scott's Second Law: When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been wrong in the first place. Corollary: After the correction has been found in error, it will be impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation. | |
| Second Law of Business Meetings: If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you will pick the wrong one. Corollary: If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it wrong, anyway. | |
| An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny. | |
| Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done. | |
