"While we cannot place Pythagoras among the great or event near-great mathematicians, his position in the history of scientific thought remains unchallenged. ...dictum "Number rules the universe" ...in the broad modern sense ...is there anything in the dictum to which a modern scientist could not or would not subscribe? The theories of relativity and quanta have shaken the physical sciences to the very foundation, forcing the physicist to cast overboard such principles as conservation of energy or economy of action, and to revise the very concepts of space, time, matter, cause and effect. Still, number reigns as firmly in the new physics as it did in the old."