colleagues, of defection to the other side. For example, the theoretical physicist that treads too close to the border runs the risk of having his work dismissed as “mere reformulation”, or worse as [*just mathematics*]{}, i.e. not ‘real’ physics. The point is well taken. While learning more math will enable the physicist to communicate better with mathematicians, it will not necessarily lead to new or even better physics. This is because physics is much more than the study of the subset of mathematical equations that is isomorphic to physical phenomena. On the other hand, mathematicians are far more than nit-picking grammarians that clean up the details after physicists have done the work of creating new language (e.g. Newton’s calculus) as a side effect of their struggles to comprehend the universe.

Rather than dismiss practitioners of the opposition because they lack sophistication in our own language, it behooves us to acknowledge that mathematics and physics are with distinct agendas and criteria. An example in point was the ‘open problem book’ of the conference, in which mathematicians posed concise questions for which an answer is yet unknown (or even known to exist, as in Fermat’s last theorem) but presumably can be solved 