10 правил Алексея Крылова
Alexey Krylov

Quotes:

1. In engineering there is no room in for adjectives, only numbers.

2. The most difficult thing in any endeavor is its correct justification at the beginning, only then it can be advanced further.

3. There are two groups of observational sciences called “exact”, the first including astronomy, physics, chemistry, etc., and the second including white and black magic, astrology, graphology, palmistry, etc. Meteorology belongs to the latter.

4. Through my practice over the years, I have become convinced that when an absurdity becomes routine, it becomes ever harder to eradicate the more nonsensical it gets.

5. A practitioner, a technician, what should every engineer be... must develop not only his mind, but also his feelings so that they not deceive him; he should not only be able to watch, but also to see; he should be able not only to listen, but also to hear, not only to smell, but also to smell; his own conclusions should be reduced not to a timid Cartesian “I think therefore I exist” but to a firm, practical:

“I see it, I hear it, I touch it, I smell it – this is what it is.”

6. It was said by Galileo: “Stultorum infinitus est numerus” (“the number of fools is infinite”).

7. A dream must also be managed, or it, like a ship without a steering-wheel, will carry one God knows where.

8. A real engineer must believe his eye more than any formula; he must remember the words of the naturalist and philosopher Huxley: “Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness," and it is engineer’s job to look at what is being ground.

9. My father often used to say: “Of all you will learn as a child, you will forget just about everything except for what you will deal with later, and except for languages which only can only be learned for life in the childhood. As an adult, you can learn to read and write, but you cannot break your tongue, even though it has no bones, and will carry your Novgorod accent with you, while mastery of foreign languages is the supreme thing in life.” I valued the fairness of these words throughout my life.

10. No school can crank out a ready engineer, shop manager or independent designer, but it is obliged to instill basic knowledge, basic principles, some basic skills and, in addition to knowledge, the ability to apply knowledge in one’s work; then the engineer’s apprenticeship at the factory will become a school of continuous improvement throughout his life, in which he will not succumb to a routine, and will hone his skills year after year, becoming a chief production engineer or a true designer and innovator in his business.