Finite Number Quotes

• I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.

  Neil Armstrong

  Running, Believe, Exercise

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• It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

  Douglas Adams

  Love, Life, Relationship

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, p.93, Pan Macmillan

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• I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I'm damned if I'm going to use up mine running up and down a street.

  Neil Armstrong

  Fitness, Running, Believe

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• The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.

  Georg Cantor

  Independent, Order, Numbers

  "Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality". Book by Rudy Rucker, 1987.

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• What I assert and believe to have demonstrated in this and earlier works is that following the finite there is a transfinite (which one could also call the supra-finite), that is an unbounded ascending lader of definite modes, which by their nature are not finite but infinite, but which just like the finite can be determined by well-defined and distinguishable numbers.

  Georg Cantor

  Believe, Numbers, Discovery

  "Understanding the Infinite". Book by Shaughan Lavine, 1994.

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• The transfinite numbers are in a certain sense themselves new irrationalities and in fact in my opinion the best method of defining the finite irrational numbers is wholly disimilar to, and I might even say in priciple the same as, my method described above of introducing trasfinite numbers. One can say unconditionally: the transfinite numbers stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers; they are like each other in their innermost being; for the former like the latter are definite delimited forms or modifications of the actual infinite.

  Georg Cantor

  Fall, Numbers, Discovery

  "Understanding the Infinite". Book by Shaughan Lavine, 1994.

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• When I was in college, for the games of that era, I was as hard core as anyone was. I wouldn't say I outgrew it, but you always have to have a finite number of addictions.

  Bill Gates

  College, Games, Numbers

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• I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation; plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

  Noam Chomsky

  Fall, Mean, Numbers

  Source: libcom.org

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• However unapproachable these problems may seem to us and however helpless we stand before them, we have, nevertheless, the firm conviction that their solution must follow by a finite number of purely logical processes.

  David Hilbert

  Numbers, May, Problem

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• Definitions must contain the means of reaching a decision in a finite number off steps, and existence proofs must be conducted so that the quantity in question can be calculated with any degree of accuracy.

  Leopold Kronecker

  Mean, Numbers, Decision

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• To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.

  A.J. Ayer

  Numbers, May, Way

  "Language, Truth, and Logic" by A.J. Ayer, (p. 20), 1936.

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• Life is not a continuous process, there's some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.

  Bill Gates

  Numbers, Achievement, Life Is

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• Euclid manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does.

  Lucio Russo

  Numbers, Doe, Analysis

  "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn". Book by Lucio Russo, 2004.

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• We each have a finite number of heartbeats, a finite amount of time. But we have enough heartbeats and enough time to do what is important.

  Susan L. Taylor

  Time, Numbers, Important

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• The first rule of economics is that there is an infinite number of desires chasing a finite number of goods, services and resources. The first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.

  Thomas Sowell

  Numbers, Desire, Firsts

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• Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

  Bill Gates

  Moving, Numbers, Tvs

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• In any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in a finite number of configurations, just as a deck of cards can be arranged in only finitely many different orders. If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat.

  Brian Greene

  Order, Numbers, Space

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• We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is.

  Blaise Pascal

  Change, God, Knowledge

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• In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process

  Isaac Asimov

  Data, Numbers, Mind

  Isaac Asimov (1990). “The Complete Stories”, Broadway Books

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• Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.

  David Foster Wallace

  New York, Mean, Numbers

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

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• It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Distance, Science, Order

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