The ultimate goal of mathematics is to eliminate any need for intelligent thought.

Attributed to Whitehead in A = B (1996), by Marko Petkovšek, Herbert S. Wilf, and Doron Zeilberger, p. 3, but this most likely had its origins in a margin note submitted by an anonymous student, quoted in the book Concrete Mathematics : A Foundation for Computer Science (1992) by Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, p. 56. That book, with which Wilf was quite familiar, on page 503 quotes Whitehead making a very similar statement. Indeed, that quotation (from chapter 5 of Whitehead's An Introduction to Mathematics) is already correctly attributed above.