One day it occurred to me to measure the speed with which such rumors were propagated. All I had to do was to start one - the more preposterous the b… - André Weil

Mozart's music, even at its most beautiful, often gives an impression of some being who, though very far above us in his incomprehensible serenity, nevertheless stops to remember us for a brief instant and comes within our reach, with gentle mockery and tender pity, to transcribe a fleeting message for us. But sometimes, in certain quartets and quintets, and in certain parts of The Magic Flute, this same being, without a thought for us, communicates with his fellow beings, and what we hear then is a world unknown to us, a world of which we are allowed only a furtive glimpse.

Both the Jews and the brahmins of southern India are communities that, for twenty centuries, have devoted themselves tirelessly to the most abstract subtleties of grammar and theology. For the Jews it was the study of the Talmud, a task often passed down from father to son; for the brahmins, it was the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. It is hardly surprising that the younger generations, when their time came, turned toward the sciences, and preferably the most abstract among them: this trend was merely the natural extension of millennial traditions.

Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced, if only rarely, the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously, and in which the unconscious (however one interprets this word) seems to play a role. In a famous passage, Poincaré describes how he discovered Fuchsian functions in such a moment. About such states, Gauss is said to have remarked as follows: "Procreare jucundum (to conceive is a pleasure)"; he added, however, "sed parturire molestum (but to give birth is painful)." Unlike sexual pleasure, this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do so at will, unless perhaps by dogged work which it seems to reward with its appearance. It is true that the pleasure experienced is not necessarily in proportion with the value of the discoveries with which it is associated.