In an article I'm writing I want to quote (with attribution) the original version of an aphorism that says that one can often find mathematical gold in the waste-baskets of physicists. Would someone provide a reference to that original version?


Note added after awarding bounty: For the time being, I'm going to assume that the quote is actually due to me! (I came up with it a few weeks ago, but it leaped into my mind with such rapidity that I suspected I wasn't inventing it so much as remembering it.) If anyone finds the quote in the next few months (before I include it in my own published work without attribution), please let me know! I'll be glad to make private arrangements to transfer 50 of my reputation points to you.



Source of quotation about the waste-baskets of physicists
Here's one scientist (not quite a mathematician) who found gold in wastebaskets:


*I started looking in the trash cans of science for such phenomena [fractal scaling], because I suspected that what I was observing was not an exception but perhaps very widespread.* 


[Benoit Mandelbrot](http://faculty.cbu.ca/philosophy/arcadia/librar15.htm)


It seems he meant this literally, and at least one paper [1] was inspired by a scrap he grabbed from a wastebasket.


[1] B. Mandelbrot, *Information theory and psycholinguistics: a theory of words frequencies*, in: P. Lazafeld, N. Henry (Eds.), Readings in Mathematical Social Science, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1966.


