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> It is reality what drives mathematicians to work, not a pure abstraction. In general, no. > It is because of reality that maths is interesting. It is becaus
by brazzy 14y ago
> It is reality what drives mathematicians to work, not a pure abstraction.
In general, no.
> It is because of reality that maths is interesting. It is because of Geo-metry that algebra is so relevant.
Perhaps to you, but not to most mathematicians, certainly not those working in academical settings. Have you ever looked at group theory or topology?
I don't think you've ever done the kind of math that mathematicians do. What you learn in school is not math, it's calculating. What mathematicians do is to invent constructs that have no basis in reality and prove statements about them, then come up with more constructs based on those statements, ad infinitum.
Sometimes those constructs may be designed to model real world problems, and getting funding is probably easier in those areas, but just as often the applicability is only discovered afterwards - or not at all.
The best example (because it's something we've actually all learned about) is complex numbers. They were first invented in teh 16th century and considered pointless and irrelevant at first. People soon discovered that they could be useful in proofs about non-complex numbers as well, but it took several centuries before they were found to be directly applicable in electrical engineering (many more applications have been discovered since).
- ricardobeat 14y ago> invent constructs that have no basis in reality Regardless of how abstract you get, how far you go, math is always tied to our physical reality. The basic operations are reflections on properties of our universe. The "kind of stuff" mathematicians do" allows us to model and reason about our world in ways that wouldn't be possible any other way (that we know of).
- brazzy 14y ago> The basic operations are reflections on properties of our universe. No, this is most definitely not true for all branches of mathematics.
- rickhanlonii 14y ago>math is always tied to our physical reality I'm sorry but even if this is objectively valid, this not a claim that you can support. There are entire sub-fields of maths in which there are no known physical attachments. Now, that's not to say that some time in the future we won't discover the relationship between every mathematical concept and some physical system. But at this moment, the claim you are making has a numerable set of counter examples, with a very large order. For one example, take the Banach–Tarski paradox: >Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball.[1] This is, as far as we know, physically nonsense. That being said, there is quite a lively debate among mathematicians as to whether or not math is tied to reality. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox