Is mathematics invention or discovery? When mathematicians come upon their results are they just producing elaborate mental constructions which have no actual reality, but whose power and elegance is sufficient simply to fool even their inventors into believing that these mere mental constructions are ‘real’? Or are mathematicians really uncovering truths which are, in fact, already ‘there’ – truths whose existence is quite independent of the mathematicians’ activities? I think that, by now, it must be quite clear to the reader that I am an adherent of the second, rather than the first, view,
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