"Any idiot," he said calmly but with immense conviction, "can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience." - David Berlinski

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.)

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.”

I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances.