FOM: What is mathematics, anyway?

[Karlis Podnieks]

On Dave Rusin's home page (see
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/beginners.html )
you can find the following definition of mathematics as

"The part of science you could continue to do if you woke up
tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone."

Dave says, he heard it from others. Do you know who is the
author?

By the way, this definition is provably equivalent to my
definition of mathematics (see my home page).

Best wishes,
K.Podnieks
podnieks at cclu.lv
http://www.ltn.lv/~podnieks/
University of Latvia, Institute of Mathematics and Computer
Science