Hilbert, a gentleman, never questioned Einstein’s victory, even though he was working on very similar equations at the time. In fact, he left a gentle and beautiful phrase, which captures perfectly Einstein’s difficult relationship with mathematics. And which captures, perhaps, the difficult relationship that exists generally between the whole of physics and mathematics. The math that was necessary to formulate the theory was geometry in four dimensions, and Hilbert writes: Any youngster on the streets of Göttingen understands geometry in four dimensions better than Einstein.* And yet, it was
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