The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up.

William Elwood Byerly

...and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.

— W.W. Rouse Ball

astronomycalculationcarl-friedrich-gauss

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

— Werner Heisenberg

languagemathmathematics