Quote for the day

"...[T]he mathematician lives in an ideal world, and the practical importance of his conclusions must depend on the essential similarity of his world to ours. Now as practical engineers it is our business to assess this similarity and never to mistake the mathematical abstraction for reality.... "

page 3, The Design and Use of Instruments and Accurate Mechanisms, T.N. Whitehead, MacMillan, 1934, Reprinted by Lindsay Publications