Is Math Invented or Discovered? I asked 8000+ People and Here’s What I Found
Mathematics is the best language that can be used to understand the universe. It is the best tool physicists use to describe the physical phenomena of the universe. Mathematics seems to work wonders in pretty much every scenario. Still, there’s been a question that has been a matter of discussion, especially amongst philosophers and thinkers for the past several decades: Is Mathematics invented or discovered?
Mathematics is pure and abstract much like languages. Languages help us understand each other’s expressions, feelings, and thoughts and this has been in existence ever since the dawn of human civilization. Mathematics, likewise, seems to have existed ever since the dawn of the universe itself and the reason behind that is that it works so well with describing the physical realities of the universe. The numbers, the shapes, the patterns, and the way they perfectly fit into each other are unfathomable in some sense. This can make anyone think that mathematics has been in existence for all time.
On the other hand, however, mathematical notations and mathematical notions came into existence as a subject of instruction around the 6th century BC. It was the Pythagoreans who coined the term from the Greek word “mathema”. The discipline was further developed and refined by the Greeks and was practically applied as proofs and theorems for engineering by ancient Romans. The concept of applied mathematics came into practice when the Romans used it to create solar and lunar calendars and developed a numeral system. The Hindi-Arabic number system was then developed in ancient India and mathematics was further developed in Medieval Europe, China, and Arab.
Mathematica came into practice as a discipline in the physical sciences during the scientific revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries by prolific mathematicians like Gottfried Leibnitz, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Leonhard Euler, Tycho Brahe, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and many others. Even though the concept of mathematical number systems, theorems, proofs, and disciplines came into existence after the 6th and 7th centuries BC, the method of counting has been into existence since the stone age and hunting age. Considering all these historical notions of mathematics, it seems as thought math wasn’t really discovered but was invented by us to understand the world around us.
But the question still remains.
Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?
In my attempt to gain some perspective in this regard, I ran a poll on Twitter about the same.
Out of 8379 total votes, 65.9% of the people think that mathematics was discovered and that it has always been out there as a language of nature. That accounts for 5522 people. 34.1% of people think that Mathematics was invented. That accounts for nearly 2857 people.
There were some fascinating responses from people who think that it was both invented and discovered. Here are a few of them:
Here’s what I think,
There are mathematical patterns and shapes everywhere. A triangle, for example, exists in nature in many different forms. Likewise, a sphere, an ellipse, or a hexagon. The earth is slightly irregularly shaped ellipsoid, the orbits of the planets are elliptical, and the shapes of a bee hive are hexagonal. But in order to understand these shapes, we require mathematical theorems. Pythagorean theorem, for example, holds true for all triangles, laws of hexagons hold true for all hexagonal structures, equation of an ellipse is true for all ellipses. Hence, it’s a discovery. In order to show that these theorems work, they need to be proven and so they were invented. In that sense, I think, mathematics is both invented and discovered.
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