Robin Sloan Quotes

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

All creation requires a scientific brain.

I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

This modeling thing, it's pretty easy, but actually it's also really tough.

Unfortunately, I'm an engineer. I'm always thinking about, what's the task and how do I get it done? And some of my tasks are pretty broad, and pretty fuzzy, and pretty funky, but that's the way I think.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

I was always good at math and science and physics.

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.

I'm an artistic person and a creator. I'm not a scientific. I'm not an engineer.

I wonder if I would have been less organic of a designer without my background. Maybe I would be more academic about designing, more methodical. I want things to be a certain way, and I'm very precise, but school itself wasn't that relevant for me.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

My parents are both scientists. They like order.

If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.

Solving wits and puzzles, in a way, helps to develop wit and ingenuity.

I'm the kid that tried to take Latin in school because I felt if I could understand the root of everything, then I could understand why it worked. That was what took me into engineering. And the reason I stayed is, engineering teaches you to solve problems. It teaches you to think.

I'm an engineer by trade, and what engineers do is they go and build, and they don't think a lot about storytelling.

I'm very left-brain.

I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.

My game is more a game of thinking than anything else.

There's a human element here you start to lose when you start rattling off the best mathematical equation to get the out.