3 ms·
Mathematics, in all its "purity" and "abstractness", is, to me, always a reminder of the limit of the human brain. How we've got to have a starting point of as
by necovek 4y ago
Mathematics, in all its "purity" and "abstractness", is, to me, always a reminder of the limit of the human brain.
How we've got to have a starting point of assumptions and concepts to be able to construct any theory, or really, to think about anything: we can never really start from nothing and fully understand things.
In that sense, instead of divine, it's painfully humane to me!
And that's why I respect and love it even more: it's the nicest thing our constrained brains could come up with :)
- mr_mitm 4y agoFunny, I see math as a tool to overcome our shortcomings. Most fundamental concepts like spacetime or quantum mechanics are absolutely mind bending and our limited brains are hopeless at understanding them. Math enables us to break down and translate hugely complex phenomena into things we can understand.
- ivansavz 4y ago> math is the nicest thing our constrained brains have come up with WOW, What a nice idea and well worded! I've already paraphrased you statement to make it more slogany, but I think it can be improved further if we s/thing/structure/ or some other more precise word like that. Or to reuse your description from earlier: > math is the nicest structure our constrained brains have been able to construct This is a nice one-phrase explainer of what math is. So many people I know confuse the idea of math (abstract thinking and modelling) with arithmetic, so I'm always on a lookout for ways we could re-associate the pointer "math" to it's correct meaning.