Herbert Westren Turnbull over het belang van invarianten
Attaching significance to invariants is an effort to recognize what, because of its form or colour or meaning or otherwise, is important or significant in what is only trivial or ephemeral. A simple instance of failing in this is provided by the poll-man at Cambridge, who learned perfectly how to factorize a2 - b2 but was floored because the examiner unkindly asked for the factors of p2 - q2.
Herbert Westren Turnbull, in J. R. Newman (ed.), The World of Mathematics (1956)
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