A Quote by Terry Pratchett

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Terry Pratchett

Quote Topics

Intelligence Creature Crowd Known Number People Root Square

Quote Author

Terry Pratchett
English - Author
April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015

No one fully understands spinors. Their algebra is formally understood but their general significance is mysterious. In some sense they describe the 'square root' of geometry and, just as understanding the square root of -1 took centuries, the same might be true of spinors.

Michael Atiyah

The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful.

Carson McCullers

There was a young fellow from Trinity, Who took the square root of infinity. But the number of digits, Gave him the fidgets; He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

George Gamow

The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

Keith Devlin

I plan on getting out there and mixing with the crowd. I want to show everyone what happens in Times Square not from a distance, but from right there in the crowd.

Regis Philbin

But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.

Philip Pullman

I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up.

Edward Carpenter

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

Bill Nye

Our culture already has a number of well known stories about artificial life and non-human intelligence. In 'Exegesis,' I've tried to not only tell a new and engaging story but also to comment on those well known stories through the details of my novel.

Astro Teller

If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here

Tom Lehrer

It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number.

Alexis Carrel

The square root of I is I.

Vladimir Nabokov

Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who are from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts, but brothers, not rivals, but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence...The difference... is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging.