Not much of an Engineer:

Here is the legendary British engineer,  Stanley Hooker, not much for some.

Berry’s rule:

“In science we like to emphasize the novelty and originality of our ideas. This is harmless enough, provided it does not blind us to the fact that concepts rarely arise out of nowhere. There is always a historical context, in which isolated precursors of the idea have already appeared. What we call “discovery” sometimes looks, in retrospect, more like emergence into the air from subterranean intellectual currents.” — in Anticipations of Geometric Phase, Physics Today, December 1990

Feynman’s rule:

“Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.” — in Feynman’s lectures on Physics

George E Forsythe’s suggestion (circa 1970):

“If one just ignores the relations between mathematics and its important applications, I fear that an instructor is running the risk of being exposed by some technological chapter of the Students for Democratic Society for not being relevant, and that is a very nasty accusation nowadays. Why risk it?”