If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
Eric Temple BellWherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
Eric Temple BellGalois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.
Eric Temple BellEven stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.
Eric Temple BellIn his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."
Eric Temple Bell