The Virtues of Mathematics

I met JJ again at a mathematics conference sponsored by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Just like the first time, he was sitting alone at a table in a corner of the hotel bar, gazing at me across the room with dark, inscrutable eyes.

As soon as I sat down, he pushed a piece of paper in my direction. “Here,” he said laconically. “For your students.”

So I went to work: and here I must needs observe, that as reason is the substance and original of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanic art.

Daniel Defoe

Ich behaupte aber, dass in jeder besonderen Naturlehre nur so viel eigentliche Wissenschaft angetroffen werden koenne, als darin Mathematik anzutreffenist.

Immanuel Kant