-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Nearly twenty years after I graduated high school and my last calculus class, I still get that nightmare where I’m at the exam for a calculus course I somehow forgot to attend, or that I faked my way through with absolutely no idea what was going on. When I wake up, I have a hard time being sure it wasn’t all real. But actual students actually working to grasp calculus, algebra or trigonometry can’t say for sure whether or not they are studying “real” stuff either.
Even though so much of our world relies on math – from algorithms to rocket engineering to cash registers to mathematical equations describing real phenomena in the universe – there isn’t yet a consensus on whether math is actually objectively real or just some stuff humans invented. Indeed, within the sub-field of philosophy of mathematics, mathematicians, philosophers and quantum physicists advance and argue about theories regarding the “realness” of numbers and the logical systems by which they are used in mathematics. The views on this range from “the universe is pure mathematics” to “mathematics is an internally-consistent logical construct with no relation to real things in the real world.
” Much of the discussion depends on the historical development of mathematical thought and scientific understanding — but digging deeper into the question might challenge our assumptions about not only the nature of numbers, but the nature of the universe .