This means defining the basic traits of QFT so that future mathematicians won’t have to think about the physical context in which the theory first arose. Now mathematicians want to do the same for QFT, taking the ideas, objects and techniques that physicists have developed to study fundamental particles and incorporating them into the main body of mathematics. This impulse (along with revelations from Gottfried Leibniz) birthed the field of calculus, which mathematics appropriated and improved - and today could hardly exist without. Almost 2,000 years later, Isaac Newton wanted to understand Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and attempted to find a rigorous way of thinking about infinitesimal change. Mathematics turned it into a discipline with definitions and rules that students now learn without any reference to the topic’s celestial origins. The ancient Greeks invented trigonometry to study the motion of the stars. For millennia, the physical world has been mathematics’ greatest muse.
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