Oh, TI-83! How sweet is the nectar of the sweetest flower of the sweetest fruit when compared to the brilliance of your display? How hath thou helped me, and sheltered me, and guided me these last three and a half years? Ah, those ways are innumerable.
How hast the stores of your program bank pulled out the variable t in a formula having both t and t[sup]2[/sup]? Granted, I coaxed you in this pursuit, but it was your silicon that gave me the positive and negative discriminant fair!
How hast thou given me all the statistical analyses in heaven and earth? In all ways. Thou hath sheltered me through Statistics, Algebra, Precalculus and Calculus, to say nought of Major courses.
While the quote is attributed to Leibniz in the collection of Jerry Uhl’s Favorite Quotations, this particular sentiment is at odds with the character of Leibniz that I recall: a man who believed firmly in the enlightenment idea that with sufficient information, an elementary calculation could be performed to determine the correct decision in any conceivable circumstance, i.e., the moral course of action would be no more difficult to discern than the solution to an arithmetic problem, applying a formula like the categorical imperative instead of performing sums and products. Furthermore, I have reason to suspect that several of the quotations on that page are also misattributed, so Leibniz might not actually have made that remark. In any case, it’s a fitting reply to the post by Mercury.