most recent 30 from http://mathoverflow.net 2013-05-24T18:36:55Z http://mathoverflow.net/feeds/user/14955 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/rdf http://mathoverflow.net/questions/3559/colloquial-catchy-statements-encoding-serious-mathematics/64320#64320 Wesley Tansey 2011-05-08T20:18:34Z 2011-05-08T20:18:34Z

<blockquote>There's no such thing as a free lunch.</blockquote> <p>This refers to the No Free Lunch theorem. The theorem states that it's impossible to develop a search optimization algorithm that works well for all possible problems. Rather, for every class of problems which a given algorithm performs well at, there is a complementary class for which it does not. Thus, you may think you're getting a free lunch, but you're really just paying for it somewhere else.</p>