The Price of Calculation

One-minute read

In a world in which the price of calculation continues to decrease rapidly, but the price of theorem proving continues to hold steady or increase, elementary economics indicates that we ought to spend a larger and larger fraction of our time on calculation. [J. W. Tukey : The American Statistician : Sunset Salvo]

Over the next ten years, I hope that more and more mathematically minded hackers, empowered by open source tools like the R programming language and emboldened by the popularization of statistical analyses by people like Steve Levitt, will follow Tukey’s suggestion.