“Nothing is more attractive to me than a muddled domain awaiting its first theory. I feel most at home with a jumble of glittering data and the feeling that they might be fitted together for the first time into some new pattern.

This inclination made me especially compatible with mathematicians. I became fascinated with the way they think, why they should be so much better at quantitative reasoning than I, what difference it made in the end, why I should be the one so often to suggest moving in a particular direction, but then even more frequently not be able to do so, and finally how different everything looked after a little progress had been made.”

~ E. O. Wilson