... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.
Eugene WignerThe world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found.
Eugene WignerThe enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.
Eugene Wigner