"In the twelfth century, for example, Bhāskara demonstrated correctly that \sqrt{3} + \sqrt{12} = 3\sqrt{3}, an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University. (It is pleasant to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)"