I can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that math is invented? Maybe he came up with the symbols of integration and derivation, but these are phenomena, no? We’re just representing it in a “language” that makes sense. I’ve also heard people say that we may need “new math” to discover/explain new phenomena. What does that mean?
Edit: Thank you for all the responses. Making so much more sense now!
In: Mathematics
What is a ‘phenomena’ to you? Math is used to describe other stuff (when useful at least). And it has rules that let you transform things into equivalent other things. Sometimes those other things are clearer or answer something for you.
Do you know what Calculus is, or is used for? And what happens with/in it? It’s not just 1 + 1 = 2. It’s about getting the area under a curve from the formula, and precisely. Or finding how much change is happening at a specific point (where a curve changes direction for instance). Or what happens between 0 and infinity along a curve. Or at least that’s what I can recall from my long ago Calculus classes.
They’re useful if you have questions they answer, and they’re not obvious unless you already know them (to most people at least).
That’s how a new math would be useful. It means we’d have a new way of answering something that stumps us today using symbols and numbers, maybe with new operations like sin/cos/tan did for triangles. It’s the hope that some new way of looking at a problem will be much faster than existing methods, or answer new unknowns.
And as far as “Newton invented calculus” it’s that he’s credited with publishing the ideas first. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t… but it’s not a big deal to me who specifically did something in a well known/public way. He worked out the rules and results of it, and shared it with other people. Who looked at it, and tried to see if it made sense to them or answered anything useful.
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