"When the mathematician speaks of the existence of a 'functional relation' between two variable quantities, he means that they are connected by a simple 'formula that is to say, if we are told the value of one of the variable quantities we can find the value of the second quantity by substituting in the formula which tells us how they are related. [...] The thing to be clear about before we proceed further is that a functional relationship in mathematics means an exact and predictable relationship, with no ifs or buts about lt. It is useful in practice so long as the ifs and buts are only tiny voices which even the most ardent protagonist of proportional representation can ignore with a clear conscience." (Michael J Moroney, "Facts from Figures", 1951)
"Just as mathematics aims to study such entities as numbers, functions, spaces, etc., the subject matter of metamathematics is mathematics itself." (Frank C DeSua, "Mathematics: A Non-Technical Exposition", American Scientist, 3 Jul 1954)
"A common and very powerful constraint is that of continuity. It is a constraint because whereas the function that changes arbitrarily can undergo any change, the continuous function can change, at each step, only to a neighbouring value." (W Ross Ashby, "An Introduction to Cybernetics", 1956)
"The mere fact that the same mathematical expression -Σ pi log(pi) [i is index], occurs both in statistical mechanics and in information theory does not in itself establish any connection between these fields. This can be done only by finding new viewpoints from which thermodynamic entropy and information-theory entropy appear as the same concept." (Edwin T Jaynes, "Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics" I, 1956)
"There are good statistics and bad statistics; it may be doubted if there are many perfect data which are of any practical value. It is the statistician's function to discriminate between good and bad data; to decide when an informed estimate is justified and when it is not; to extract the maximum reliable information from limited and possibly biased data." (Alfred R Ilersic, "Statistics", 1959)
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