Quotes:Math 699
From Tractatus
Weyl, Hermann (1885 - 1955)
Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.
The Mathematical Way of Thinking, an address given at the Bicentennial Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, 1940.