Over time you will get the wrong answer more times than you get the right answer. That’s not a problem! You’ve learnt what doesn’t work, just try aga… - William Rowan Hamilton

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

Comparatively few engineers are good mathematicians; and... it is fortunate that such is the case; for nature rarely combines high mathematical talent, with that practical tact, and observation of outward things, so essential to a successful engineer.
There have been... brilliant exceptions; but they are very rare. But few even of those who have been tolerable mathematicians when young, can, as they advance in years, and become engaged in business, spare the time necessary for retaining such accomplishments.

Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.