"A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it." (Samuel T Coleridge, "Letters", 1836)
"The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form, so many problems of morphology." (Sir D’Arcy W Thompson, "On Growth and Form", 1951)
"How beautifully simple is Wessel’s idea. Multiplying by √-1 is, geometrically, simply a rotation by 90 degrees in the counter clockwise sense [...] Because of this property √-1 is often said to be the rotation operator, in addition to being an imaginary number. As one historian of mathematics has observed, the elegance and sheer wonderful simplicity of this interpretation suggests 'that there is no occasion for anyone to muddle himself into a state of mystic wonderment over the grossly misnamed ‘imaginaries'. This is not to say, however, that this geometric interpretation wasn’t a huge leap forward in human understanding. Indeed, it is only the start of a tidal wave of elegant calculations." (Paul J Nahin, "An Imaginary Tale: The History of √-1", 1998)
"God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of the microwave radiation." (Paul Erdős)
"Reality is a wave function traveling both backward and forward in time." (John L Casti)
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