It is here, at this very moment when the first utterly trivial differential equation is solved, that the secret form of words is revealed that makes … - David Berlinski

The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.

Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say.
“Remember me.”

In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that <math>\sqrt{3}</math> + <math>\sqrt{12}</math> = <math>3\sqrt{3},</math> an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)