"It doesn't matter what mathematical things are: it's what they do that counts. Thus mathematics hovers uneasily between the real and the not-real; its meaning does not reside in formal abstractions, but neither is it tangible. ...it is the great strength of mathematics—what I have elsewhere called its "unreal reality." Mathematics links the abstract world of mental concepts to the real world of physical things without being located in completely in either."
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Ian Stewart, Preface to second edition of What is Mathematics? by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, revised by Ian Stewart (1996).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics
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Mathematics
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