TITLE: Source of quotation about the waste-baskets of physicists
QUESTION [12 upvotes]: 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.

REPLY [4 votes]: A somewhat similar quote of Alain Connes "The mathematical concepts that arise naturally in physics often turn out to be fundamental, as Hadamard pointed
out" can be found in "The Princeton Companion to Mathematics" http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html page 1006 (Article VIII-6).
I searched in the Hadamard's "An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" https://archive.org/details/eassayonthepsych006281mbp for the mathematical gold in the waste-baskets of physicists but have found nothing.
P.S. Dyson's "Missed opportunities" can be found here http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183533964 However it does not contain your quote.
Note added: I just found a remotеly similar quote "On the fringes of physics it contains such recent mathematical gems as Virasoro algebra representations on the moduli spaces of curves" in Yuri Мanin's essay "Interrelations between Mathematics and Physics" http://www.emis.de/journals/SC/1998/3/pdf/smf_sem-cong_3_157-168.pdf His other essays can be found in the book http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=cworks-20 I have not checked it for the searched quote (I doubt it can be found there).