Quotes About Notation

Find for your pencils A way to mark your memory

Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, , to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits.

For the biographer, the final clue to character lies in the yet unread - the scribbled note, the diary page, a notation in the margin of a draft - until the day when even the most devoted portraitist of the dead says, "Enough!" Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible - resurrection.

Cents are the most universally used interval measure.

the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

I can play just about any keyboard but I can't read or write a note.

Marking and underscoring a book makes it more interesting, and far easier to review rapidly.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

Suprisingly, one of the most complex pieces of code is the code to determine where a note is in the staff. Finale stores notes as relative scale positions in the current key.

Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 B.C., respectively).

The reformed and placated pirate-mariners brought with them many Danish customs. They had a different notation, which they would have been alarmed to hear described as the "duodecimal system". They thought in twelves instead of tens, and in our own day in certain parts of East Anglia the expression "the long hundred" (i.e., 120) is heard on market-days.

Freiherr Hugo Reiss made a notation on his pad. Broach subject with SS General Otto Skorzeny, or better yet Otto Ohlendorf at Amt III of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Didn't Ohlendorf head Einsatzgruppe D?

As long as we are engaged in this orgy of unnecessary terminology and notation…

Sottolineo molto e ho l'abitudine di segnare alla fine del libro i numeri delle pagine che mi interessano, di modo che un giorno, leggendo quella serie di riferimenti, potrò in pochi minuti dare un'occhiata alle cose che più mi avevano sorpreso.

Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift.

In trying to capture the beautiful mystery, this monk had invented written music. Not yet notes, what he'd written became known as neumes.

I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

We met the list comprehension briefly in Chapter 4. Syntactically, its syntax is derived from a construct in set theory notation that applies an operation to each item in a set, but you don't have to know set theory to use this tool.