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Lobachevsky is quoted in many places to have once written (said?) "There is no branch of mathematics, no matter how abstract, which may not someday be applied to phenomena of the real world." (In the original: Нет ни одной области математики, как бы абстрактна она ни была, которая когда-нибудь не окажется применимой к явлениям действительного мира.) My question is: where can this be found in his work? I am not interested in being told about a book from the 1980s that has this in a list of quotes, so please don't waste time telling me about sources other than Lobachevsky's.

I did find online a copy of some of his collected works, but the file wasn't in a form that allowed a text search by computer.

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    Thought I could be lazy and did a search in books.google.com with that quote and the author but didn't get any results. There was 399 books with that quote in it, maybe if no one knows it offhand you can look at them to see if they cite the original source of the quote. Good luck!2012-01-03
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    @Lostsoul: I looked in a lot of places using Google and Yandex. At some point I just gave up with that; all the books love to give quotes but they don't bother saying where the quotes come from, which is kind of annoying.2012-01-03
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    Ahhh those jerks :-)2012-01-03
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    Why does it matter? We all know Lobachevsky plagiarized his best work from Tom Lehrer.... (Do I need to add a smiley face, or will people get that I am joking?)2012-01-18

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