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" Ancient people, like the Greeks, had a deep fascination with numbers. Could it be that in difficult times numbers were the only constant thing in an ever shifting world? To the Pythagoreans, an ancient Greek sect, numbers were tangible, immutable, comfortable, eternal, more reliable than friends, less threatening than Apollo and Zeus. "
― Clifford A. Pickover , The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics
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" Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world. "
― Clifford A. Pickover , The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics
