Quotes from Mario Livio

The Greek excellence in mathematics was largely a direct consequence of their passion for knowledge for its own sake, rather than merely for practical purposes. A story has it that when a student who learned one geometrical proposition with Euclid asked, "But what do I gain from this?" Euclid told his slave to give the boy a coin, so that the student would see an actual profit.

The result that Noether obtained was stunning. She showed that to every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics there corresponds a conservation law and vice versa.