Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.

Harold Calvin Marston Morsewas an American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large, a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse-Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue-Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications.