"Mathematicians are usually regarded as clear and sober thinkers, but some of the men who have been gifted with the most marvelous power of mathematical analysis have not been free from the defects and vagaries of common mortals. Newton was extremely irritable, Laplace was inordinately vain, Monge, the inventor of descriptive geometry, was very forgetful and absent-minded. These men, however, were not fanciful dreamers, and few such are found among great mathematicians. One of these few was Johann Heinrich Lambert, the first man who endeavored to construct a system of the universe."