How can mathematics be “theoretical?”
In: Mathematics
A lot of mathematics describes things that don’t actually exist. In fact, most mathematics do. For example, the way a mathematician describes a line is impossible. A mathematical line has 0 width, yet any physical representation of a line has at least some width, even if it’s pretty small.
Some approximations (like the line one) are pretty realistic and don’t effect things much, so a lot of the reasoning about mathematical lines applies just as well to real lines, so it’s harder to see where the theoretical comes in. But there are also branches of math that have absolutely no relation to “real” objects or phenomena. It’s hard to give examples of such things at an eli5 level, since they are very far outside what a nonmathematician would ever think about.
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