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- Seen Jan 2, 2015
A long standing debate amongst mathematicians.
Mathematics is an entirely separate category of science from physics, biology, chemistry etc. Where Physics you study the universe and it's contents, biology you study living organisms, chemistry is interactions of nanoscopic particles. But math is just math. You can't really see it, so it's more like a tool for other sciences, right?
Maybe..
The question is, did human beings discover or invent mathematics?
On one side the discovery of math implies that it is a universal property of everything, everything uses math, it implies that there is more math to be discovered, named and synced with our current understanding of math. It may also go to lengths even to say that there is math waiting for us to discover that resembles nothing like what we have and that we don't understand even after its discovery.
The other side however, invention, implies that humans needed at multiple stages in our evolution ways of understanding things and from that ways to understand other things from information about things we already know. It also implies more or less math does not exist in reality but only in our minds, as a tool to figure out how to smash open a coconut and when we decide that we want to know how the tool works, we invent.. More math..
So I'm very interested about what you intellectuals have to say here about if it's just humans using math or rocks, and platypuses, and supernovae.
Everybody keep it clean and you must realise that there is no real solid answer to this question so respect everyone's opinion even when it doesn't coincide with yours, thank you :)
Mathematics is an entirely separate category of science from physics, biology, chemistry etc. Where Physics you study the universe and it's contents, biology you study living organisms, chemistry is interactions of nanoscopic particles. But math is just math. You can't really see it, so it's more like a tool for other sciences, right?
Maybe..
The question is, did human beings discover or invent mathematics?
On one side the discovery of math implies that it is a universal property of everything, everything uses math, it implies that there is more math to be discovered, named and synced with our current understanding of math. It may also go to lengths even to say that there is math waiting for us to discover that resembles nothing like what we have and that we don't understand even after its discovery.
The other side however, invention, implies that humans needed at multiple stages in our evolution ways of understanding things and from that ways to understand other things from information about things we already know. It also implies more or less math does not exist in reality but only in our minds, as a tool to figure out how to smash open a coconut and when we decide that we want to know how the tool works, we invent.. More math..
So I'm very interested about what you intellectuals have to say here about if it's just humans using math or rocks, and platypuses, and supernovae.
Everybody keep it clean and you must realise that there is no real solid answer to this question so respect everyone's opinion even when it doesn't coincide with yours, thank you :)