The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" was the title of the 1959 Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences, delivered at New York University by the physicist Eugene Wigner, and published in Communication in Pure and Applied Mathematics in 1960. In it, Wigner observes that pure mathematical concepts that have been developed and studied independently of physics, often so mathematicians can show their “ingenuity and sense of formal beauty”, nevertheless often find applications in physics.