Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves. The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting , but counting unconsciously.
Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
Quoted in O Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times. The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road. Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it. The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful resource of the human spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being.