Matthew Waller

“Beauty comes out of necessity. For though we may dress up the truth with fancy aesthetic theories, we are biologically programmed to appreciate colour and the reflected glare of the sun for our survival.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“everything is made of elements, yet the pure elements themselves seem oddly elusive, almost always locked away in inscrutable minerals and compounds. Searching for the elements in nature was like raiding a bakery and finding plenty of cakes and buns but no sign of the flour and sugar from which they were made.”
― Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc

“living in cities was one of the things which caused humans to rely on maths. But which part of city living is recorded in our longest-surviving mathematical documents? Brewing beer. Beer gave us some of humankind’s first calculations.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors