Edward Frenkel

And it was one of the greatest discoveries in theoretical physics in the 60s that those particles were not elementary, but in fact had the smaller parts.

And he said, oh, so then you probably know representation theory of the group SU3.

I said, like, SU what?

So in fact...

I wanted to know what were the underpinnings of those theories.

I knew the story.

I knew the narrative.

I knew kind of this basic story of what these particles look like.

But how did physicists come up with these ideas?

How were they able to theorize them?

And so I remembered, you know, like it was yesterday.

So he pulls out a book.

And it's kind of like a Bible, like a substantial book.

And he opens it somewhere in the middle.

And there I see the diagrams that I saw in popular books, but in popular books, there was no explanation.

And now I see all this weird symbols and equations.

It's clear that it is explained in there.

Oh my God.

He said, you think what they teach you at school is mathematics?

It's like, no, this is real mathematics.