Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

A number of aspects of mathematics are not much talked about in contemporary histories of mathematics. We have in mind business and commerce, war, number mysticism, astrology, and religion. In some instances, writers, hoping to assert for mathematics a noble parentage and a pure scientific experience, have turned away their eyes. Histories have been eager to put the case for science, but the Handmaiden of the Sciences has lived a far more raffish and interesting life than her historians allow.

Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.