NP Alabama Pi

[desert search for techno allah]

Paul Mackin writes:
>Isn't there the thought kicking around that math is built into nature
>somehow rather than being a mere mental construct evolved in, or invented
>by, Man (not to exclude Woman) in order to make sense out of nature. Do
>some people look at things this way? Is God a mathematician? Or,  would
>math to Him seem just a low-level round about way humans go about earthly
>business.

Well, yes and no. As you might expect, the relationship between math
and nature is a complicated one. A text I used last year, _Post-Modern
Algebra_, characterized it thusly: science studies the structure of
the world, mathematics studies the structure of science (and, more
relevantly for the book, algebra studies the structure of mathematics).
This gets at a lot of the relationship: much of math has developed through
a symbiotic relationship with science - e.g. the differential and
integral calculus. It also points out how much of math is math's own
doing - e.g. algebra's abstraction away from arithmetic, to study
the structures that other mathematicians use.

I think usually it's not thought that math is "in" nature somehow
in the sense I think you're meaning. That said, the relationship
is obviously there.

Apply this same line of thinking to natural language, and I think
you'll see similar kinds of complications.

>Seems like if God were a mathematician physical constants and such
>could have been round numbers. Preferably one or zero.

Many physical constants were essentially chosen to make theories
look nicer - cf. the permittivity of free space, and, uh, the
other one that I can't remember. There are formulations of Maxwell's
equations in which these constants appear, and some in which they
don't, because different units make them disappear. Etc.



Josh

-- 
josh blog: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/blog/
      tdr: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/tdr/