“I am afraid that mathematics will perish by the end of this century if the present trend for senseless abstractin — as I call it: theory of the empty set — cannot be blocked up.”

—  Carl Ludwig Siegel

in a 1964 letter to L. J. Mordell as quoted by [C. S. Yogananda, The Life and Times of Bourbaki, June 2015, Resonance, 556–559, http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/020/06/0556-0559] (quote from p. 558)

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German mathematician 1896–1981

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