"It is not surprising that the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it in the most varied arts, in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture, although it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of all the arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy." (Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923)
"The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought." (Havelock Ellis, "The Dance of Life", 1923)
"Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself." (Arthur S Eddington, 1927)
"I have myself always thought of a mathematician as in the first instance an observer, a man who gazes at a distant range of mountains and notes down his observations. His object is simply to distinguish clearly and notify to others as many different peaks as he can.” (Godfrey H Hardy, “Mathematical Proof”, Mind 38, 1929)
"Our environment may and should mean something towards us which is not to be measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician." (Arthur S Eddington, "Science and the Unseen World", 1929)
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