“How can it be,” Einstein asked in wonderment, “that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?” Frenkel’s take on this is very different from Einstein’s. For Frenkel, mathematical structures are among the “objects of reality”; they are every bit as real as anything in the physical or mental world. Moreover, they are not the product of human thought; rather, they exist timelessly, in a Platonic realm of their own, waiting to be discovered by mathematicians. The conviction that mathematics has a
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