Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented? : The Best Writing on Mathematics 2012TimothyGowers, Timothy, "Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?" in Meaning in Mathematics, ed. John Polkinghorne, Oxford University Press, 2011, 3-12.
a convoluted pre-history of a few simple but powerful mathematical ideas and the way they were inherited, or ignored, or re-discovered by new generations of mathematicians. That old paper was too technical, but I borrow from it a couple of softer passages. ...
The PBS Ideas Channel has just released a new video which discusses whether maths is invented by humans, or whether it is discovered (ie whether it can be said to really exist). It’s an excellent 10 minute introduction to a pretty complicated topic – and certainly accessible for students:...
Is Mathematics INVENTED or DISCOVERED? How Old Is Mathematics? The tale of mathematics is as old as humanity. It has evolved from simple math, like counting cattle, to an intricate study of an object through abstract concepts that we know today. It was not until 600 BC, when civilizations ...
If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something we’ve created. The alternative is that mathematical facts arediscovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines and planets. ...
This result was already well known at the time of Plato and may well have been discovered within the school of Pythagoras in the 5th centurybce, as some late authorities likePappus of Alexandria(4th centuryce) maintain. In any case, by 400bceit was known that lines corresponding to√3,√...
I realized what Albert Einstein’s statement really means. I had this thought that Mathematics was neither created nor invented by humans. Because math has been there before we existed, it is naturally occurring. We just discovered math, and we continuously developing it. In which the idea supp...
Introduction As a high-school math teacher, my first activity for every class was a discussion exploring the classic question: "was mathematics invented or discovered?" Although I professed to be agnostic in this discussion, I was not. I believed that mathematics existed "out there"—independent...
When was math invented? No single person "discovered" or "invented" math, as humans likely always had some number sense and the ability to count. For instance, a43,000-year-old baboon bonefrom southern Africa has notch marks that a person may have made to tally the 29 days of the month...
and 2. Is mathematics ultimately discovered or invented?Unreasonable EffectivenessLivio traces the development of mathematics from ancient Greeks, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato through the middle ages and the enlightenment to the present, and provides mini-bibliographies on Galileo, DeCartes, Ne...