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"Mathematics, rightly
viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold
and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our
weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet
sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the
greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the
sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest
excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
(Bertrand Russell, The Study of Mathematics, in Mysticism and Logic,
and Other Essays, ch. 4, London: Longmans, Green, 1918.) |
