Hello and welcome back on Curiosity.gr. In today’s article I want to talk about mathematics. Would mathematics exist without humans? Is it written in the Universe and a natural part of it? Or is it just an artificial human-made language like English, German or Greek?
What exactly is mathematics? Well, no one really knows. While you can say very precisely what you study in sciences like chemistry or physics (chemical substances and the basic phenomena of nature) this is harder to tell for math. The things mathematics is about (Numbers, functions, points) can be made visible with equations and symbols but what they really describe are imperceptible, abstract objects.
So, are the binomial formulas or the constant π natural or does the nature only stand behind them? Most of the mathematicians belief that math exists in the universe. Where and how is not clear yet but that’s why our world is that mathematical. That would mean we humans only find mathematics. But as present is the opinion that maths is made up by humans and our world only seems to be mathematical. A long time ago, when numbers didn’t exist, humans collected for example a stone for each piece of meat they had and by comparing the stones the were able to compare who had the most meat. The stones later transformed into numbers so you could shout them and even later into symbols so you could write them down and today mathematics could be seen as a language which has been created by mankind like all other languages too, to describe natural things. That would mean that real things do not contain any math but we use it to make a model of the universe which we can understand and communicate better. If that is true it would also mean that there are many other possible languages as mathematics to describe the universe. Highly intelligent people like Daniel Temmet for example who are able to calculate difficult mathematical problems on hundreds of decimal places in their head, say about them selfs that they do not necessarily use math. He for example calculates with landscapes in his head. Also, the decimal system we use to count is made up by us because we have ten fingers and eleven is one time all our fingers plus one. An alien species who has more or less than ten fingers would never use this system. But not only that they would use another system to count, if mathematics is not natural, there would be an infinite number of possible alternatives they could have made up.
Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujvS2K06dg4, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=fNnChs54zLY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mve0UoSxTo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/01/21/does-math-really-exist/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKZnkU12cPs
Written by: Simon