"With the intrusion of irrational numbers to disrupt the integral harmonies of the Pythagorean cosmos, a controversy that has raged off and on for well over two thousand years began: is the mathematical infinite a safe concept in mathematical reasoning, safe in the sense that contradictions will not result from the use of this infinite, subject to certain prescribed conditions?"
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Eric Temple Bell, The Development of Mathematics (1940)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Number
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