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by cskinner 2087 days ago
The article spends most of its words discussing the reality of math via Platonism vs empiricism while forgetting its own title "What is Math?"

If going for a pithy answer, I like tha following quote by G. H. Hardy:

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

I think I originally saw this quote in "A Mathematician's Lament" [0] (also known by the author's name as "Lockhart's Lament"), which has a lot to say about modern math education.

[0] (PDF) https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/Lockharts...