“There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.”

—  Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky

As quoted in George Edward Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane, Springer (1998 [1975]), p. 225; also in Stanley Gudder, A Mathematical Journey, McGraw-Hill (1976), p. 36.

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Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky 1
Russian mathematician of Ukrainian origin 1792–1856

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