It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences

The Handmaiden of the Sciences.

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality . . . creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.