Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after… — David Berlinski

In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that + = an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances.

The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.