CrowSvenson
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- Seen Aug 24, 2016
I'm too right-brained for this. But I'll say it was invented. Like logic itself, it's something WE made, and doesn't "exist" outside of our grey matter.
I think whatever in math was right has been discovered and whatever is incorrect in math has been invented...
I heard someone mentioned a cube and square. We can find the area and volume of a cube/square by various formulas but the style of those may be different. But it works, so shouldn't it be true because volume and areas exist in every kind of 2-D and 3-D shapes imaginable?
@Livewire - Exactly! I couldn't have put it better myself.
@Quopol - That is an interesting perspective that has yet to appear and it is indeed well thought out but I must continue to respectfully disagree. The issue with your view isn't correct vs incorrect, it is that it still views mathematics and the principals it describes as the same thing.
Incorrect maths is invented just as you said and pretty much for the reasons you said. I'll give you that one. But correct mathematics was also invented - correct mathematics just means we are using the language of mathematics to accurately describe a discovered principal. In this sense correct mathematics is the equivalent of writing a non-fiction book whilst incorrect mathematics is more like writing a narrative.
It is as Livewire, myself and a few others on here have said. You are all viewing mathematics as though the formula we use to calculate gravity is the same thing as the actual force of gravity.
This is the perfect answer, I'd say. Mathematics as a language is something that we invented to try to understand our universe in a way that we can manipulate, but the ratios and equations taking place in every day life have always been there. It's entirely possible that our view on the universe (from a mathematical standpoint) is entirely wrong and we've been miscalculating everything (and it's possible that things simply can't be calculated), but given that we're able to understand, evaluate and manipulate the world in the ways that we do, I think it's a safe bet that we've got this down haha. It's interesting to consider an unquantifiable world in which all maths we took to be law is revealed to be false, but from the limited knowledge that we have, it seems likely that'll never happen.Math as a language was invented, but the concepts that language explains existed long before we were able to codify them. It's not like special relativity existed only after Einstein told us all about it. ;p
What you guys are doing is the same as saying that an apple is the same thing as the word "apple" when in reality one is an object and the other is the word we use to describe that object.
What do you all think about the notion that maths, being perfect a perfect system (100% consistent, no issues, contradictions, etc) cannot be man-made?
It feels like mathematics is something invented because you can do things in math that have no correspondence in the real world. Where do negative numbers exist in nature? Imaginary numbers? (Serious question - I'm not a math person.) Like language, we can create words (and conceptions) of things that don't or can't exist.
Imaginary numbers are used a lot in engineering principles and such. I did a course on them in my final year of university but a lot of the stuff I covered escapes me now haha. As for negative numbers, think about opposing forces. So you're driving your car and you have a forward driving force and the backwards force is the resistance. This backwards force can be considered as a negative number to represent a force acting in the opposite direction to the driving force - it all depends on how you choose to label your diagram when you do these kinds of calculations.
Feels to me like mathematics is an interpretation of nature. Nature is discovered, but nature is not math. Math is the language we use to understand nature. In that sense it feelss like it's more communication than anything, a worldview or conception. I think there are several ways of understanding nature, math being just one of them.
Who are you responding to?The problem with that, as I have said before, is that you are all confusing mathematics with what it describes.
@Arlo - I was responding to Omicron and Archer, but really it applies to anyone who is trying to say that the naturally occurring patterns and "rules" that we describe through mathematics is the same as the language. They, and everyone else, are of course entitled to their opinions but I, as you may have noticed, disagree to a rather large degree.
Sorry about being unclear as to who that was directed at.
Maths is a perfect self-contained system. We represent it with an invented language and numeracy system to model things that we perceive and concepts we've invented, but maths itself is not invented.
Definitely not invented, discovered. Math exists in nature and many examples can be made, like fibonacci's series in plants or nautilus. As Livewire stated above, the way we express math was invented, but math itself was just discovered.