Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty --
a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any
part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping 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 in poetry.
-- Bertrand Russell
