It is very strange that mathematicians are led by their sense of mathematical beauty to develop formal structures that physicists only later find useful, even where the mathematician had no such goal in mind. A well-known essay by the physicist Eugene Wigner refers to this phenomenon as “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.” Physicists generally find the ability of mathematicians to anticipate the mathematics needed in the theories of physicists quite uncanny. It is as if Neil Armstrong in 1969 when he first set foot on the surface of the moon had found in the lunar dust the
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