Recent missed opportunities à la Freeman Dyson There is an excellent paper by Freeman Dyson from 1972 (here) and therein the author cites old talks by Hilbert (here) and Minkowski (chapter 2 here) speaking about similar topics, namely how opportunities for discoveries could be better if mathematicians and physicist worked more closely.
I wanted to ask if there are recent publications (roughly > 2000) of that type?
 A: There was an FQXi essay competition on this subject in Spring 2015:
"Trick or Truth: the Mysterious Connection Between Physics and Mathematics"
Here is the home page with links to winners and other entries:
http://fqxi.org/community/essay/winners/2015.1
The competition is meant to encourage an informal style, readable by non-experts, but with some scientific and mathematical education. A few authors ignore the advice and jump straight into more advanced language (e.g. Peter Woit), but there aren't many equations and on the whole they are very accessible.
Dyson's paper is cited by many of the entries, alongside the other classic in the genre, Wigner's "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960) [pdf].
I also meekly suggest that since Ed Witten descended to earth, progress on the mathematics of physics has been remarkable (see also Atiyah, Maldacena, ...), but perhaps the monstrous edifice of String Theory has temporarily poisoned the well. See the popular books:


*

*"Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit 

*"The Trouble With Physics" by Lee Smolin


No mathematcial physics resource list would be complete without a reference to John Baez's blog "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics" [home], which contains many multi-disciplinary tales of mystery and imagination. 
Kat
A: I'm surprised Freeman Dyson didn't mention Emmy Noether, a German mathematician, and her contribution to the conceptual structures of the mathematics in modern physics in his paper. Nina Byers goes into this in detail in her paper "E. Noether’s Discovery of the Deep Connection Between Symmetries and Conservation Laws" in 1998.
https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9807044v2
"Though the general theory of relativity was completed in 1915, there remained unresolved problems. In particular, the principle of local energy conservation was a vexing issue. In the general theory, energy is not conserved locally as it is in classical field theories - Newtonian gravity, electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, etc.. Energy conservation in the general theory
has been perplexing many people for decades. In the early days, Hilbert wrote about this problem as ‘the failure of the energy theorem’. In a correspondence with Klein [3], he asserted that this ‘failure’ is a characteristic feature of the general theory, and that instead of ‘proper energy theorems’ one had ‘improper energy theorems’ in such a theory. This
conjecture was clarified, quantified and proved correct by Emmy Noether."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
