In fact the most
successful systems that humans have been able to design are ones in which
most of the design effort goes into letting the system be able to grow in a
fashion that detects and corrects the error, so that the system doesn't
come apart. The Internet is a good example of that, because it's something
that didn't require any central control and wasn't constructed, the way a
clock is constructed. Another good example is the American Constitution,
because the people who designed it realized that it would be very difficult
to write laws for how people should live 50 years from their time and
place, so they wisely made most of the Constitution a way of dealing with
error situations that would come up and a way of keeping bad things from
propagating. They didn't try to tell people how they should live over the
next two centuries.
The reason our group has been successful is
that our whole development system is designed to allow us to late-bind
things that we discover along the way, things we would not have to find out
along the way if we had a real engineering discipline.
Anyway, Open Source Software is
software done the way science is done, and the code you write is open to
scrutiny and criticism and improvement by people you have never met.
I would say that, temperamentally, I am basically an idealist, which makes me
pretty much of a mathematician. Scientists tend to be realists, and
engineers pragmatists.
Creative organizations -- at least the ones I have been in -- were
like science in that they have first-level anarchy and second-level
controls.
Science absolutely can't
allow dogma -- that's anarchy -- so you have to allow scientists to think
and explore and come up with any theory. And then for this thing to work
you have to have the second level of stuff which says, okay, now let's
debug these ideas. So I would say a very large number of people don't
understand how science works.

IBM Research | Ponder this | pages

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programming: Ask Reddit : What is the best way/book/site to learn Mathematics as a language(making it easier to read math as you read english)

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How to Read Mathematics

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A reading protocol is a set of strategies
that a reader must use in order to benefit fully from reading the text.
Poetry calls for a different set of strategies than fiction, and
fiction a different set than non-fiction. It would be ridiculous to read
fiction and ask oneself what is the author's source for the assertion
that the hero is blond and tanned; it would be wrong to read
non-fiction and not ask such a question. This reading protocol
extends to a viewing or listening protocol in art and
music. Indeed, much of the introductory course material in literature,
music and art is spent teaching these protocols.
The beauty in a novel is in the aesthetic way it uses language to
evoke emotions and present themes which defy precise definition. The
beauty in a mathematics article is in the elegant efficient way it
concisely describes precise ideas of great complexity.
Don't assume that understanding each phrase, will enable you to
understand the whole idea. This is like trying to see a painting by
staring at each square inch of it from the distance of your nose. You
will get the detail, texture and style but miss the picture completely.
A math article has a story! Try to see
what the story is before you delve into the details. You can go in for
a closer look once you have a framework to fill with details, just as
you might reread a novel.
The best way to understand what you are reading is to make the idea your own.
This means following the idea back to its origin, and rediscovering it for
yourself. Mathematicians often say that to understand something you must first
read it, then write it down in your own words, then teach it to someone
else. Everyone has a different set of tools and a different level of “chunking
up” complicated ideas. Make the idea fit in with your own perspective and
experience.
Most math books are written with
assumptions about the audience: that they know certain things, that
they have a certain level of "mathematical maturity", etc. Before you
start to read, make sure you know what the author expects you to know.

Reading a Math Book

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Project Euler

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Moserware: How the legacy of a dead mathematician can make you a better programmer

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Stevey's Blog Rants: Math For Programmers

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Hash table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Birthday problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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The Rule of 72 | BetterExplained

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