"At the very base of all these different kinds of mathematics, there is an eternal question or eternal mission of mathematics, and that is infinity. Consciously or unconsciously, what mathematicians do is a finitization of infinity. It is impossible to put infinite things into a computer. It doesn’t matter how good a computer may be, how fast it becomes; it cannot compute infinite things. But there the mathematician has a job to do: to formulate a . The model may not match exactly the original phenomenon, but it helps you to understand it. And the model is finite: you can put it in a computer, and the computer computes the exact answer, at least for the model. So mathematicians give infinity a finite shape or a finitely computable and understandable form. This is quite an interesting feature of human nature. To my way of thinking, humans are different from other animals in that humans have a notion of infinity. They never see infinity, they never live infinitely, and even the universe may not last infinitely long. But humans cannot live without the idea of infinity."