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Larry Niven

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Forget the infinities: Concentrate on detail.
--
p. 68

 
Larry Niven

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Benjamin Peirce's lectures dealt, to be sure, with the higher mathematics, but also with theories of the universe and the infinities of nature, and with man's power to deal with infinities and infinitesimals alike. His University Lectures were many a time way over the heads of his audience, but his aspect, his manner, and his whole personality held and delighted them.

 
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We do not forget the sorrows of Egypt, we do not forget Haman, we do not forget Hitler. Thus, among the unjust, we do not forget the just. Remember Oskar Schindler.

 
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After being relegated to an obscure mid-tier university, blocked from leading journals and openly mocked by his peers, including his former mentor, the late 19th century German mathematician found refuge for his groundbreaking work on infinities in, of all places, the Roman Catholic Church... Catholic theologians welcomed Cantor's ideas, which provided a workable way of understanding mathematical infinities, as evidence that humans could grasp the infinite and could also, therefore, have a greater understanding of God, himself infinite.
What a welcome relief this must have been to the chronically depressed Cantor! As John D. Barrow writes in The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless, Cantor "started to tell his friends that he had not been the inventor of the ideas about infinity that he had published. He was merely a mouthpiece, inspired by God to communicate parts of the mind of God to everyone else."

 
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I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.

 
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We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.

 
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