Your Doctor has been thinking about the progress of mathematics. Any single piece of mathematical knowledge lives beyond the realm of its own discovery, its publication, its propagation and it applications. Its truth is objective and immortal. The fact that each theorem can be traced back to the time, place and person of its first statement and proof gives us the illusion of a timeline, an orderly peeling back of the layers of the onion. But if any theorem had not been first stated and proved as it was, it would surely have been (or will be) stated and proved at some other time, somewhere else, by somebody else. This must be so as (whether hidden or known) it is consistent with the axioms, true and unchanging.
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