A Quote by Keith Devlin

Calculus works by making visible the infinitesimally small.

Keith Devlin

Quote Topics

Calculus Making Small Visible Works

Quote Author

Keith Devlin
British - Mathematician
Born: March 16, 1947

If a nonnegative quantity was so small that it is smaller than any given one, then it certainly could not be anything but zero. To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be. These supposed mysteries have rendered the calculus of the infinitely small quite suspect to many people. Those doubts that remain we shall thoroughly remove in the following pages, where we shall explain this calculus.

Leonhard Euler

Without a visual identity, we have no community, no support network, no movement. Making ourselves visible is a political act, making ourselves visible is a continual process.

Joan E. Biren

It was from them that I learned that hard work in stable surroundings could yield rewards, even if only in infinitesimally small increments.

Sidney Altman

A thought no less than a thing, an idea equally with an empire, is resolved into a complex of infinitely extensive relations between infinitesimally small parts.

Sangharakshita

People pay little attention to banner ads - in fact, everyone dislikes them - and that leads to infinitesimally small click-through rates that make marketers unhappy.

Om Malik

The ones that catch your eye are the ones that are basically people who live on the road and follow us around. They're a small percentage of the audience, but they're quite visible. The ones who aren't visible are the stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, housewives.

Bob Weir

The chances of there being transmissibility by blood to blood contact on a basketball court is so infinitesimally small that it is something that shouldn't influence a decision whether someone would come back or not.

Anthony S. Fauci

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Richard Dawkins

Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined.

Ronald Ross

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

James Cameron

If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being?

Edgar Allan Poe

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get 'Calculus for the Practical Man.' By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

Richard P. Feynman

Recognize that being one of the only black people in an organization, or just in a meeting, automatically makes you very visible. Use this to help yourself. Look at it as an opportunity, and leverage that opportunity by making a visible contribution.

Kenneth I. Chenault

A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

Karl E. Weick

Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?