This reminds me of my Italian grammar teacher telling me that nouns can be broken into two categories: ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ (for example, ‘chair’ and ‘love’ respectively). Then came a totally mind bending digression for my eight-year-old mind when she mumbled “well actually all nouns are abstract because there’s no such thing as a chair divorced from reality, there’s nobly instantiations of these abstract concepts we consider close enough to be concrete”. That totally blew my mind. Together with reading The Computational Beauty Of Nature” when it first came out nine years ago those were the two key experiences that drove me towards choosing to get a degree in mathematics.