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
Newton (and Leibnitz) were the first people to realize that numbers could be manipulated in this way and describe the rules governing those manipulations and relationships, such as finding the area under a curve. They came up with the actual symbols we use and described the rules governing what those symbols mean and how they can be used. When we say things like “take the derivative of the function”, that is something that theoretically we could always have done, but Leibnitz and Newton were the first to recognize this truth and how it could be useful.
If you want to get into the philosophy of it, then it can be argued that all math just sort of already exists somewhere in the abstract sense, so no one ever really ‘invents’ or ‘creates’ math, but practically speaking if we don’t know about a certain mathematical principle or outlook then we can’t use it, so the distinction between ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ is kind of academic.
Latest Answers