Primes and Particles

Mathematics and physics have been borrowing notions from each other for a very long time. Some mathematical object or construction provides a superb model of the physical world. Some physical account instantiates a more general mathematical object or construction, avant la lettre, that mathematical notion only then discovered. Abstract mathematical constructions are found to be useful by physicists, sometimes decades after the mathematicians have lost interest in them. Physical theories develop as they will, while across town, there is mathematics that will enlighten the physicist—but by chance such enlightenment may take place, if it does, decades later than would be ideal.