From A Divine Language, which will be published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

1.

Prime numbers are those that can be divided cleanly only by themselves and by 1. The first primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 23. Prime numbers are where imaginary mathematics begins. They are an example of our discovering properties of numbers, rather than creating them. Idealism is the name of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discipline that believed that the mind creates what we know and that there is nothing we can know that the mind hasn’t created.…