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There is no general consensus about the definition of mathematics or its epistemological status—that is, its place inside knowledge. A great many professional mathematicians take no interest in a definition of mathematics, or consider it undefinable. There is not even consensus on whether mathematics is an art or a science.
Now, since the principles of mathematics are numbers, and they thought they found in numbers, more than in fire and earth and water, similarities with things that are and that become (they judged, for example, that justice was a particular property of numbers, the soul and mind another, opportunity another, and similarly, so to say, anything ...
Social constructivists see the process of "doing mathematics" as actually creating the meaning, while social realists see a deficiency either of human capacity to abstractify, or of human's cognitive bias, or of mathematicians' collective intelligence as preventing the comprehension of a real universe of mathematical objects. Social ...
The definition: A real number is algebraic if it’s the root of some polynomial with integer coefficients. For example, x²-6 is a polynomial with integer coefficients, since 1 and -6 are integers.
Mathematics addresses only a part of human experience. Much of human experience does not fall under science or mathematics but under the philosophy of value, including ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. To assert that the world can be explained via mathematics amounts to an act of faith. 4. Evolution has primed humans to think ...
It contrasts with nominalism, fictionalism, and logicism in holding that mathematics is not about mere names or methods of inference or calculation but about certain real aspects of the world. Aristotelian realists emphasize applied mathematics, especially mathematical modeling, rather than pure mathematics as philosophically most important.
Considerations about mathematics being the language of nature can be found in the ideas of the Pythagoreans: the convictions that "Numbers rule the world" and "All is number", [7] [8] and two millennia later were also expressed by Galileo Galilei: "The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics". [9] [10]
Mathematics makes up that part of the human conceptual system that is special in the following way: It is precise, consistent, stable across time and human communities, symbolizable, calculable, generalizable, universally available, consistent within each of its subject matters, and effective as a general tool for description, explanation, and prediction in a vast number of everyday activities ...