Math Is A Fundamental Part of Nature

Nature is an unstoppable force, and a beautiful one at that. Everywhere you look, the natural world is laced with stunning patterns that can be described with mathematics. From bees to blood vessels, ferns to fangs, math can explain how such beauty emerges.

Math is often described this way, as a language or a tool that humans created to describe the world around them, with precision.

But there's another school of thought which suggests math is actually what the world is made of; that nature follows the same simple rules, time and time again, because mathematics underpins the fundamental laws of the physical world.

This would mean math existed in nature long before humans invented it, according to philosopher Sam Baron of the Australian Catholic University.

"If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something we've created," Baron writes.

Instead, if we think of math as an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world, as Baron and others suggest, it might prompt us to reconsider our place in it rather than reveling in our own creativity.

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A world made of math
This thinking dates back to Greek philosopher Pythagoras (around 575-475 BCE), who was the first to identify mathematics as one of two languages that can explain the architecture of nature; the other being music. He thought all things were made of numbers; that the Universe was 'made' of mathematics, as Baron puts it.

More than two millennia later, scientists are still going to great lengths to uncover where and how mathematical patterns emerge in nature, to answer some big questions – like why cauliflowers look oddly perfect.

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE FUNDAMENTAL PART OF NATURE, CLICK HERE...

Babylonian Tablet

TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.

First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. 

But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.

Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. 

Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.

Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.

These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.

It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. 

However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.  READ MORE