Was math discovered or invented ?

@helenS i have been discovering statitics.
DONT YAWN! Much of it was invent'd gamblers.
It has re informed me of the counterintutive nature of reality. Regression to the mean,, all that

@SatyrService Yes the most important result of statistics is that personal experience does not count at all.
Rather frustrating isn't it!

@helenS Algebra is concepts. And geometry is algebra expressed in form.

@helenS ? Refer to your quote of Kronecker...

@SomeMichGuy Oh – now I get it. Thank you! 🌷

@helenS 😉 np and ebenfalls ⚘

@SquirrelGirl I think most contemporary mathematicians will agree with you on that.

I can’t claim to be correct. However, when you start speaking in terms of the universe, the only thing we have is math.@SquirrelGirl

It was incumbent upon humans to find it

@SquirrelGirl i loved that comic

@Lostpoet Yeah. Everybody in my family’s pretty smart. I’m actually the dumbest of us all, probably. lol

@JustGoneNow I doubt it.

@Lostpoet They’re really smart, though. Like so smart I don’t always understand them.

@helenS No. I mean this post when it was first asked. I still believe that although certain values such as the circumference of a circle were discovered, the system with which we manipulate said values, was most definitely invented. You can only discover what already exists. There was no math before math. Even the base 10 Hindu–Arabic numeral system we use is invented. The ancient Babylonians used a base 60 system for their Math. You still see remnants of it in things and is why we have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.

@JustGoneNow Aaahhh yes!! I remember! thank you 🌷

@helenS Of course π exists, discoverable as a natural consequence of trying to find a "natural" unit of angular measure.

@helenS It's a joke. I blame all kind of crazy things on Gnomes. In fact MsAnThorpy blocked me becasue of Gnomes.

@SW-User She blocked you?? Why would anyone block you!

@helenS Well, you know she is always posting, "I am in a bad mood." Well, I asked her if she was infested with Gnomes. I explained Gnomes can do that, and that you can get rid of them with Raid the same stuff which gets rid of cockroaches and ants. I even explained you don't even have to spray the stuff, just display the cans in strategic areas where the Gnomes can see them, and they will vanish.

Anyway, long story short, she was not amused. She blocked me, I still hope the Gnomes leave her alone.

@revenant No doubts about that.

@revenant @revenant A large part of mathematics is deductive and an ongoing puzzle is how it applies to physical reality at all. Laws of nature are empirical and seem not to have necessity as an ingredient. e=mc(squared) seems to be different from 1+1=2 in that e might have been equal to mc cubed! It took Einstein to figure out that it was c squared.

@Alfred22 ...E could NEVER be mc^3. The units are not consistent.

The point is that Einstein's derivation did not create that reality, or we would not have had atoms w/radioactivity before him...

@okaybut Well said. I agree. The circumference of a circle just is and was discovered but the system to manipulate said values is invented.

@JustGoneNow Thanks...agree with you as well.

@SatyrService lol Math existed before algebraic geometry.

@ammelee You are sort of conservative ammelee! 🌷

@Thespis YES! And try to solve the two-body problem with only his level of calculus...

This is why I go apoplectic when I hear parents throwing around "genius" as term for their child...most people have no idea what genius is, and Newton is an iconic example.

@CountScrofula I have to admit that the empty set, and zero objects, do not exist. But an ellipsis has existed long before Adam and Eve.

@SW-User You can only make sense of things by discovering what’s already in them.

@helenS Good point, one invents in another sense perhaps.

@helenS You’re such an integral part of my life.

@Harmonium1923 Oh thaaank you! 🌷

@helenS Yes, I had the first semester of calculus, too. lol

But infinitesimals are creatures of continuous things, not discontinuous ones...and someone who quotes Kronecker probably knows that values associated with HIS δ are discrete (unlike those associated with the Dirac δ, which are continuous)...

@SW-User 😂

By the way, great question, @SquirrelGirl !

@SW-User That's an explanation of bookkeeping/low-level accounting, which is very different from mathematics in general.

That the idea of number can be tied, in counting, directly to real objects (and through this, you can demonstrate positive integers & real numbers) demonstrates that THAT aspect of mathematics is definitely reality-based. Add in trade and the notion of owing someone something, and you have justified negative numbers.

Counting & trade give you addition & subtraction. Multiplication is fast addition, division is fast subtraction, so the four basic math functions are easily derivable.

But the theoretical side--à la Descartes, etc.--is grounded enough that solutions to equations used to model reality end up describing things we may not yet have even seen, showing that our mathematics models reality amazingly well. Examples include Newton's mechanics & law of universal gravitation; Laplace's & Hamilton's reformulations of Newtonian mechanics; Maxwell's compilation of results from studies in electricity & magnetism to give the equations of electromagnetism; Hertz's derivation of electromagnetic waves; Bohr's model of atoms; Sommerfeld's quantization rule; Einstein's derivations & explanations of Special Relativity, E = mc^2, Brownian Motion, the Photoelectric effect, General Relativity; Planck's generation of his constant; Bell's derivation of his inequality; the predictions in particle physics of Gellman & Nishijima's "Eight-fold Way"; the particle predicted by Higgs et al.; etc., etc., etc.

It is discovered, uncovered, created, but based enough in reality that it describes it well, including the use of imaginary numbers to represent real waves...

@SomeMichGuy not sure Saturn Aligned Current Fields is low level accounting.
My point being that much of maths is used to relay the physical world whether counting goats or determining the power within the atom.

@SW-User No, the goat & lord of the manor thing.

Yes, mathematics has a level of reality behind it as shown by the fact that predictions we make with it can be born out in reality, even in realms where we have no direct experience (macroscopic/cosmological & microscopic length scales).

@bsawyer111 lol

@helenS 🤔

@chrisCA … not my opinion though.

@helenS It does make one think.

@Elessar disagreed, we simply interpreted math in a way we could understand, we cannot take credit for math any more than we can take credit for the ocean or the sky or electricity, electricity was harness not invented, as was math.

@xSharp Well, some concepts have been abstracted to the point that I would almost say they've been invented, than just interpreted from the observation of real world phenomena. 🤔

@Elessar a radian does not change, no matter the size of the circle