"Numerical analysis is often considered neither beautiful nor, indeed, profound. Pure mathematics is beautiful if your heart goes after the joy of abstraction, applied mathematics is beautiful if you are excited by mathematics as a means to explain the mystery of the world around us. But numerical analysis? Surely, we compute only when everything else fails, when mathematical theory cannot deliver an answer in a comprehensive, pristine form and thus we are compelled to throw a problem onto a number-crunching computer and produce boring numbers by boring calculations. This, I believe, is nonsense."