Many people who have never had occasion to learn what mathematics
is confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. In
actual fact it is the science which demands the utmost imagination. One
of the foremost mathematicians of our century says very justly that it
is impossible to be a mathematician without also being a poet in spirit.
. . . It seems to me that the poet must see what others do not see, must
see more deeply than other people. And the mathematician must do the
same.
- Sofya Kovalevskaya, 1890