“When I started my professional work in mathematics in 1960, which is not so long ago, modern mathematics in its entirety—in its entirety—was rejected by physicists, including the most avant-garde mathematical physicists. So differentiable dynamics, global analysis, manifolds of mappings, differential geometry—everything just a year or two beyond what Einstein had used—was all rejected. The romance between mathematicians and physicists had ended in divorce in the 1930s. These people were no longer speaking. They simply despised each other. Mathematical physicists refused their graduate
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