A graduate student, studying cello under Pablo Casals, played his number with what seemed to be technical precision. The great maestro commented, however: “You are playing the notes, but not the music.”

When Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematicians of the past, whose thought made the computer possible, died in 1662, it was found that he had stitched a piece of paper into his coat, so that it would be next to his heart. On the paper was a cross surrounded by the rays of the rising sun. Under the cross he had written the year of his conversion and the day and the hour, “from half past ten at night till about half past twelve.” Then, on a line by itself in capital letters, the word FIRE. And then: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. I know! I know! I feel! Joy! Peace!”