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Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math
The secret sauce is the real world.
“In the mid 1970s, he became convinced that theoretical physics was by far the most promising source of new ideas,” Nigel Hitchin, a mathematician and emeritus professor at the University of Oxford who collaborated with Atiyah wrote in 2020 of his former colleague. In 1991, for example, physicists Philip Candelas, Xenia de la Ossa, and their colleagues applied string theory to a decades-old puzzle in enumerative geometry, an ancient branch of mathematics dedicated to counting the number of solutions to geometrical problems. Vortex theory, for instance, was an early attempt by British mathematical physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) to explain why atoms came in a relatively small number of varieties.
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