A mathematical argument, once understood, is in its capacity to compel belief a miracle of enlightened life. - David Berlinski

Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after they have been completed, I am where I started, having done something but accomplished little, a useful metaphor for a great many activities in 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.)