I keep on thinking that everything around us is basically just information. Be it DNA, atoms, or spacetime itself. And math is the set of rules that explain the interaction, flow and existence of this information. We did not uncover all the rules yet. Does this make sense?
In: 8
The best way to think about math is as elaborate bookkeeping.
If I want to understand the cycles of the moon, then I might mark on a stick the number of nights that pass between full moons. I can compare multiple such sticks to find patterns of monthly cycles. And so I’ve created numbers, tallies specifically, due to a need to do bookkeeping.
But there tallies are not useful for everything. If I want to track the position of the planets, then the tallies are too crude and the computations are too complex. We can do addition and subtraction real simply with elaborate tally systems, but not multiplication, division or trigonometry, especially when we need a high degree of precision. So we might create a place-value system. A place-value system should be thought of as a way to bookkeep our numbers in ways that are amenable to arithmetic manipulation AND precision. So the base-10 system is an elaborate bookkeeping technology.
But that might not be enough. You want to track planets and predict their motion based on first principles. So instead of just large tables of measurements, you come up with the idea of a “Function” which can keep track of paths over time. Moreover, you can do things with the function itself to make better predictions, like derivative or integrals. And so functions themselves become a way to bookkeep the actual path of the planets themselves – a huge step up from tallying the number of moons in a month. But, just like the tallies, it is merely a way to bookkeep information in a way that we can use productively.
The universe does whatever it does. We are just finding elaborate Dewey Decimal Systems to try and keep track of a little bit of it. That’s what math does.
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