A Quote by John von Neumann

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

John von Neumann

Quote Topics

Elephant Fit Five Four Him His Make Parameters Trunk Wiggle

Quote Author

John von Neumann
American - Mathematician
December 28, 1903 - February 8, 1957

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'

Enrico Fermi

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.

Freeman Dyson

PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.

Ambrose Bierce

I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.

John Ruskin

Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage.

Henry David Thoreau

Senator Douglas was very small, not over four and a half feet height, and there was a noticeable disproportion between the long trunk of his body and his short legs. His chest was broad and indicated great strength of lungs.

Henry Villard

Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.

Zakes Mda

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.

George Balanchine

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

Lois Lowry

Donald Trump is a man who just absorbs information and people and experiences. And I've witnessed him firsthand with his five children, his 10 year old son, his wife Melania, who's just an incredible first lady for all of us, amazing. God bless her, we're all very luck to have her leadership, as well. And I've witnessed him with his four adult children and his eight grandchildren. He's a family man.

Kellyanne Conway

When Tetro came out, I met with Warren Beatty for the first time. I had, like, a four-and-a-half-hour lunch with him, and then over the next five years continued to meet with him and go to his house.

Alden Ehrenreich

Wiggle dresses today are certainly around, but variations have been made to make them more practical. A genuine wiggle really does make walking a challenge, so often you find them with a vent in the back so you can at least move your legs, or cut more like a pencil skirt.

Dawn O'Porter

From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. And yet, standing at his appointed place as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him.

Paul Klee

And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?