When called upon to speak in public [the mathematician] feels as a man might... who has passed all his life in peering through a microscope, and is suddenly called upon to take charge of an astronomical observatory. He has to get out of himself, as it were, and change the habitual focus of his vision.

The Collected Mathematical Papers of James Joseph Sylvester, (Volume 3), An Inquiry into Newton's Rule for the Discovery of Imaginary Roots