... treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, and what is hyp… - Henri Poincaré

Le savant digne de ce nom, le géomètre surtout, éprouve en face de son œuvre la même impression que l'artiste ; sa jouissance est aussi grande et de même nature.

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.

Mathematicians are born, not made.