--- And once more I will close with an anecdote. In a class on real variable theory, a fellow student and friend of mine who had had a class from a logician on Russell-Whitehead type logic tried at the blackboard one day to prove a theorem by putting it into Russell-Whitehead notation and manipulating the formulas entirely by rules of formal logic, especially those applying to distribution of quantitifiers. He got nowhere to speak of for some time, and the teacher finally interrupted and said with a note of exasperation, "You can't just manipulate the notation, you need an idea!" ----"Waring confessed that the demonstration [of Wilson's Theorem] seemed more difficult because no _notation_ can be devised to express a prime number. But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations."
--- Gauss, _Disquisitiones Arithmeticae_, Section 76.
William C. Waterhouse Penn State