Where+Art+Thou+Mathematics?

= Is mathematics discovered or invented? =

After Mr. Andre’s presentations of thought provoking maths, we perhaps can accept that our mathematical intuition can be limited (can even be deceptive) by our experience. To quote a student from your class discussion: “Our perception is based on what we can comprehend...”

So we sometimes need to actually use mathematics with it’s systems, axioms, rules, and theorems to get the right answers (think about the extreme origami exercise!). When we perceive patterns in nature most of us feel better and when we look at our maths (think of the exercise with the circle in which you added chords and counted spaces). the pattern that many insisted must be there was not the obvious pattern.

Most of you insisted that there had to be a pattern. There was a pattern, but what if there wasn’t? Below MIT Cosmologist Max Tegmark introduces his theory that reality is a mathematical structure, unchanging and eternal - an idea that pushes physics into the realm of philosophy.

media type="youtube" key="PTF-hHGbQ6s" height="315" width="560" But some of us think that maths are just made up formal systems not unlike the MIU puzzle. Yes they may be useful systems at figuring out much of the natural world but they are not innate in nature. Maths are more like a microscope or telescope. Just another invented tool for looking at nature but not an abstraction of nature's structure. =media type="youtube" key="TbNymweHW4E" width="560" height="315"= = Consider the the Pythagorean Theorem if a=3 and b=4: = = =

===Using the theorem, we get two possible and correct answers but as we all know, a hypotenuse cannot be a negative. So maybe Maths only seems to work at perfectly describing the universe but it is just another homo sapien creation.===

=What are the implications of the radiolab below?= media type="custom" key="18933846"