“The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.”

—  Hilary Putnam

in What is Mathematics, in [Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, matter, and method, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 0521295505, 60]

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Hilary Putnam 8
American philosopher 1926–2016

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