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Mathematics The origins of mathematics.

mal3volent

mal3volent

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This thread was split from "Palestine Discussion".

Please keep comments based in science, and related to mathematics itself.
 
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JahBeeuS said:
I'm sure they wonder why they gave us maths sometimes.
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Fucking racists

Anyone can figure out math, they just had bigger cities and ppl working on writing shit down

The western world has invented the whole modern world, middle east wouldn't have gotten that far in thousands maybe never
 
Quasimoto said:
Some animals know math and basic arithmatic. Humans didn't invent it.
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Yes. It is universal and possibly before time, but the Hindus & Arabs made great contributions to our understanding of it. Particularly algebra & trig.

Without algebra - physics, engineering, and computer science probably don't exist (or are yet discovered as you point out things exist before our "inventing" of them)
 
JahBeeuS said:
I'm sure they wonder why they gave us maths sometimes.
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When do the reparations start for bogarting all their numbers?

Pretty sure mathematics goes back way further than all recorded history. I mean Baalbek is 9000 BC, and I have a hard time believing whoever was carving those monstrous stones was mathematically illiterate. It's possible we may be rediscovering mathematics, not discovering it..
 
MedicinalUser247 said:
Math goes back billions of years.
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i don't want to drift this so maybe a mod could split it off and move it to s&t?

i don't agree that math goes back billions of years. i think the things that math describes have certainly been around since the universe 'began'.

i think that humans likely began using rudimentary mathematical concepts like counting in prehistoric times but i think ideas like arithmetic, geometry, algebra, etc. are more like 5000 years old.

i think it is very interesting to consider why mathematics seems to describe our universe/reality so well e.g.
alasdair
 
"why is math so good at describing the world?"

"why does this puddle fit perfectly into this sand hole i dug?"
 
Mathematics is the language we use to describe the universe around us and I personally believe that our minds act somewhat like a "compiler" (as in a program that converts one programming language into another). I do not believe that mathematics is something inherent to the universe but is a method our minds have evolved to interpret it.

As an example to support this there is this recent paper (Nature Article, Paper) that has proved that a certain problem in physics is undecidable (as in undecidable by a Turing machine (Halting Problem)). So the issues inherent in mathematics (incompleteness, undecidability, etc.) when it comes to computing and theorem proving carry over to physics, yet the universe just does its thing and doesn't really seem to care that in theory what its doing isn't computable.

If we're to continue down this line of reasoning one may be led to believe that the universe is doing something more than mere mathematical computations (what that is idk, we can only speculate:)).

I don't really know though, this is just my two cents :p.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced -Søren Kierkegaard​

 
Vanilla_Incense said:
If we're to continue down this line of reasoning one may be led to believe that the universe is doing something more than mere mathematical computations (what that is idk, we can only speculate:)).
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Well, I admire the work of Kurt Gödel for the elegant manner in which he showed that mathematics is doomed to be forever incomplete.

So in a sense, it seems entirely possible that there will be statements representing physical phenomena for which there is no computable explanation. Turing was able to demonstrate the halting problem, a slightly more approachable form expressing the same problem.
 
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MedicinalUser247 said:
Math starts with the beginning of the Universe.
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Math, in oversimplified terms, is a logical framework that is built from axioms that is used to describe relations between and properties of abstracted objects. The universe did not create math, it provided the conditions in which conscious beings with a capacity for abstraction could exist within a logically consistent system that they could describe rigorously. Math necessarily requires an intelligent being to formulate it in order to exist as it is the framework to describe abstract objects (like numbers, shapes, manifolds, sets, categories, etc.) which do not really “exist” in isolation from the framework which describes them.

We understand the world and communicate largely through language, but language did not exist before beings that had the capacity to use language existed. Mathematics is analogous to language in this sense, albeit it has some properties that make it distinct from language in a strict sense. Physical and socially derived forces can be well described mathematically, but this comes from an application of mathematics to those systems. This is not to say math is not newly discovered in the course of scientific discovery, but just that those discoveries can then take the same math and describe it in isolation of the scientific processes from which it was originally discovered. For all practical purposes, math did not exist until humans invented it as the math we use has entirely been progressively built upon over time by humans, even if other intelligent beings from elsewhere in the universe found equivalent mathematical systems first, or if the universe was created by an intelligent being using a mathematical framework to construct the universe (which i am not convinced of but recognize i can’t deny this possibility).
 
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