Schrödinger’s equation and the “wave function” that satisfies it are the first bold brushstrokes of a new portrait of Nature that physicists gradually filled in during the middle half of the twentieth century. The emerging pattern was strange, but not entirely alien to science. It was drawn, to paraphrase Galileo, in a mathematical idiom “without some knowledge of which it is humanly impossible to understand.” While nonmathematical accounts are conceivable, I would rather at this point say more about the mathematics because it will deepen our view of the whole enterprise of modern physics. Most people never get beyond the “math is numbers and numbers are boring” barrier that hides behind it a limitless universe of beautiful things. So let us delve briefly into the nonboring side of mathematics.