XERXES: Powerful invariants of 3-manifolds and knots?
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
COMMANDO 3: And asymptotically faithful representations of mapping class groups?
REG: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the knot invariants and the MCG representations are two things that the QFTs have done.
MATTHIAS: Homological mirror symmetry
REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the Homological mirror symmetry. I mean, the mirror symmetry goes without saying, doesn’t it? But apart from the invariants, the MCG reps, and the Mirror symmetry–
COMMANDO: Borcherds’ proof of Conway’s Moonshine Conjecture
XERXES: Donaldson’s theory
COMMANDO 2: Beilinson and Drinfeld’s partial proof of the geometric Langlands conjectures REG: All right, but apart from the invariants, the MCG representations, mirror symmetry, Moonshine conjecture, geometric Langlands and Donaldson’s theory, what have the QFTs ever done for us?
XERXES: Brought new cool physics-y words to mathematics?
REG: Oh. Cool words? Shut up!