Re: When Did Mathmatics Come About

Gene Ward Smith <genewardsmith@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:

Then not wrong so much as incomplete? But I think that is it's *primary*
use, and all the others are derivative of that.

To you, that's the primary application. To a Wall Street quant, it's
the mathematics of finance. To someone in Hollywood, it might be
computer graphics, to someone at Ft Meade, codebreaking and encyption.
There are many uses, and no doubt many yet to be discovered.

In other words, we set
up a formal reasoning system and language to do one set of tasks, and
then discover that, like any game with rules, you can do a lot more with
it...

That isn't how most mathematics got discovered. A lot of math arises
out of applications, but even more just grows out of other math. For
example, you want to solve cubic equations in radicals, and you end up
inventing complex numbers. Only much later to electrical engineeers and
quantum physicists declare that complex numbers are the cat's pajamas
for certain applications they find crucial. You still for some reason
want to solve equations in radicals, and so you invent group theory and
finite fields. Only much later do engineers and physicists determine
these are the cat's pajamas, and etc.

Sure. But I meant that the "real world" cases are historically primary
(and yes, I'm including accounting), not that we don't invent math that
turns out later to be useful. The fact is, we simply don't know what
math will be useful or not, so we invent as much of it as we can, partly
to get useful stuff but also for the sheer joy of having it.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

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