Notation quotes:

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I wrote music as soon as I knew notation. -- Harrison Birtwistle
To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect. -- Evan Parker
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. -- Elias Canetti
As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation. -- Franz Liszt
Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for. -- Harold Budd
All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation. -- Ellsworth Kelly
My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation. -- Niklaus Wirth
I don't mind that Bill Gates is a mega zillionaire; he's done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, e.g. the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field. -- Jon Evans
Imagine someone so infatuated by a band that they have every different pressing of every album the band made. Most of the time, the only difference in the album is the matrix number or a different 'made in' notation on the back cover or label. This is enough to make some people extremely excited. Actually, much more than excited. -- Henry Rollins
I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation. -- Robert A. Heinlein
composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations. -- Ned Rorem
When I write a paper, I change my notation much more than I change my concepts. -- Leslie Lamport
Black is now in desperate need of a good idea. Or, to put it standard chess notation, +- -- Mark Dvoretsky
A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher. -- Bertrand Russell
It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour. -- Gottfried Leibniz
This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around. -- Jim Blinn
Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories. -- Pierre-Simon Laplace
During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible. -- Niklaus Wirth
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation. -- William Monahan
Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so. -- Marc-Andre Hamelin
The precision provided (or enforced) by programming languages and their execution can identify lacunas, ambiguities, and other areas of potential confusion in conventional [mathematical] notation. -- Kenneth E. Iverson
the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world. -- Thornton Wilder
I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier MarÃas are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice. -- Garth Greenwell
The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating. -- Cornelius Cardew
Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician. -- Kenneth E. Iverson
By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. -- Alfred North Whitehead
...the question undoubtedly is, or soon will be, not whether or no we shall employ notation in chemistry, but whether we shall use a bad and incongruous, or a consistent and regular notation. -- William Whewell
The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought. -- Kenneth E. Iverson

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