"The universal language of the future, in the view of the tiny minority who now use it for their lives, will be mathematics. It could be so. Certainly, no other human endeavor can present so powerful an argument for a long survival in the centuries ahead, nor so solid a case for having already influenced and changed, largely for the better, the human condition. Among the sciences, mathematics has advanced more rapidly and at the same time penetrated the human mind more profoundly than any other field. I would include, most conspicuously, physics, for all the showiness of its accomplishments, and even cosmophysics; these disciplines would still be studying Galileo were it not for events that have happened in just the last three centuries in pure mathematics."
__ Lewis Thomas, Et Cetera, Et Cetera, p.161.