The general concept of a singularity plays an important role in mathematics and theoretical physics. A singularity is a point at which a mathematical function is no longer “well behaved” in some specific way, such as becoming infinite in the manner I have been discussing. Defining how to tame such singularities stimulated enormous progress in nineteenth-century mathematics, and this subsequently had a huge impact on theoretical physics. Its most famous popular consequence was the concept of black holes, which arose from trying to understand the singularity structure of Einstein’s theory of
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