THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS, Hamming, https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming.html https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Mar

THE UNREASONABLE EFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS, Hamming, https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming.html https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Hamming/Hamming.... The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Wigner, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html wikipedia article https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of... I kind of think much of mathematics was constructed to solve problems, so it's not that surprising that it solves problems. On a deeper level, any optimal internally consistent system will probably be good at reasoning about any real phenomena with the same constraints. OTOH our mathematics probably reflects human reasoning styles (despite us not understanding but "just getting used to it"), and aliens might have explored different mathematics first (e.g. algebraic geometry might make us the aliens to Euclid).