Many responded negatively to the post, but others including mathematicians like me found the questions quite insightful.
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Is mathematics real?
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Philosophers and mathematicians have beenarguing over thisfor centuries.
Some believe mathematics is universal; others consider it only as real as anything else humans have invented.
Thanks to @gracie.ham, Twitter users have now vigorously joined the debate.
For me, part of the answer lies in history.
From one perspective, mathematics is a universal language used to describe the world around us.
For instance, two apples plus three apples is always five apples, regardless of your point of view.
But mathematics is also a language used by humans, so it is not independent of culture.
History shows us that different cultures had their own understanding of mathematics.
Unfortunately, most of this ancient understanding is now lost.
In just about every ancient culture, a few scattered texts are all that remain of their scientific knowledge.
However, there is one ancient culture that left behind an absolute abundance of texts.
Their arithmetic was different from ours, though.
They didnt use zero or negative numbers.
They even mapped out the motion of the planets without using calculus as we do.
No theorems were harmed (or used) in the construction of this rectangle.
The Babylonians did all this without modern algebraic concepts.
In short, these social constructs began more than 1,000 years later, in ancient Greece.
The Babylonians happily and productively did mathematics and solved problems without any of these relatively modern notions.
What was it all for?
@gracie.ham also asks how Pythagoras came up with his theorem.
The short answer is: he didnt.
He may have been the person to introduce it to Greece, but we dont really know.
Pythagoras didnt use his theorem for anything practical.
He was primarily interested in numerology and the mysticism of numbers, rather than the applications of mathematics.
Without modern tools, how do you make right anglesjust right?
These measurements ensure that the altar has right angles in each corner.
Mathematics has been happening for a very, very long time.
Long before ancient Greece and Pythagoras.
Most cultures agree about some basics, like the positive integers and the 3-4-5 right triangle.
Just about everything else in mathematics is determined by the society in which you live.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyDaniel Mansfield, Lecturer in Mathematics,UNSWunder a Creative Commons license.
