SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Margaret Wertheim's wide-ranging essay on mathematics, "There’s more maths in slugs and corals than we can think of" covers how mathematics is implemented by humans, animals, or natural processes. It is clever and thought-provoking. Quite long, but well worth the read. Among other topics, the author touches on music, Fourier transforms, tiling, and coral reefs.
What does it mean to know mathematics? Since maths is something we teach using textbooks that demand years of training to decipher, you might think the sine qua non is intelligence – usually 'higher' levels of whatever we imagine that to be. At the very least, you might assume that knowing mathematics requires an ability to work with symbols and signs. But here's a conundrum suggesting that this line of reasoning might not be wholly adequate. Living in tropical coral reefs are species of sea slugs known as nudibranchs, adorned with flanges embodying hyperbolic geometry, an alternative to the Euclidean geometry that we learn about in school, and a form that, over hundreds of years, many great mathematical minds tried to prove impossible.
[...] The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things materially embodying fiendishly complex pieces of mathematics. How can we make sense of this? I'd like to propose that sea slugs and electrons, and many other modest natural systems, are engaged in what we might call the performance of mathematics. Rather than thinking about maths, they are doing it. In the fibres of their beings and the ongoing continuity of their growth and existence they enact mathematical relationships and become mathematicians-by-practice. By looking at nature this way, we are led into a consideration of mathematics itself not through the lens of its representational power but instead as a kind of transaction. Rather than being a remote abstraction, mathematics can be conceived of as something more like music or dancing; an activity that takes place not so much in the writing down as in the playing out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:21PM
I know the word "maths" is used in some English speaking areas. But I don't get it. Would someone from one of those areas explain?
How many maths have you encountered this week?
Can you describe the first two of them?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:44PM
Maths is short for mathematics. Which is plural because it's actually the term for the set of procedures, operations, and properties that can be considered "mathematical".
One could, I suppose propose the idea an atomic mathematic such that mathematic:mathematics::statistic:statistics, I guess. But the absence of an s in American English, is just a variance in abbreviation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Oakenshield on Tuesday February 14 2017, @08:13PM
I have been reading Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue and it's amazing how screwed up the English language is. So much of English makes no sense, it just is. It's clear that we're just making it up as we go along.
I recommend the book, it's a fascinating read.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 14 2017, @09:00PM
fascinating: The act of attaching two objects together so they are permanently bonded.
English isn't screwed up. It just wasn't planned by someone having good mathematical or logical skillz. It doesn't help that partial merges were done with vocabularies from other languages.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Oakenshield on Tuesday February 14 2017, @09:51PM
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday February 14 2017, @11:57PM
I think that some of those examples of the "meaningless do" are cases where the use of "did" adds clarity. It's not useless because the use of "did" makes it clear that it is a question, not a statement.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 14 2017, @09:42PM
Two countries separated by a common language. Its just "UK speak" for mathematics. From what I've seen of them, they talk very generically in conversation like "maths class" which in the USA would mean they're special education students still learning arithmetic even if they're high school students, because in the USA usually you take "math class" until you learn how to divide, and then you never take a math class again, you very specifically take "geometry class" or "trigonometry class" (trig) or "calculus class" (calc). You only take "math class" at age 18 if you're still mastering that addition thing at 18.
Its not just a math thing either, USA kids literally take "science class" until they're about 14 or so, then they start taking named courses of study like "chemistry class" or whatever.
An analogy the USA people might understand better is when I was a kid I ran into a group of arithmetic learning kids who called addition "plussing" and multiplication "timesing" and so on. Being a little kid I was more abrasive than I am now, and more or less asked them if they grew up in a fucking barn, but they weren't dumb or uncultured, that's just the weird way they were taught, there is no such thing as addition, there's just plussing using the plus operator and so forth. Addition, what a peculiar name for plussing, I'm sure I sounded weird to them too. When I was a little older I wonder what they'd call a sine function. Signing? Sinning?
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday February 14 2017, @11:35PM
It's from the Original Greek:
The word "mathematics" itself derives from the ancient Greek μάθημα (mathema), meaning "subject of instruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_mathematics [wikipedia.org]
Everything is originally Greek. Here, let me spray a little windex on that.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:14AM
OK, so now we know where the mathema comes from. But what is the origin of the tics?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:50AM
Nervous reflex, no doubt. Those ὁι μαθηματικὸι tend to be a twitchy lot!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 16 2017, @04:22PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday February 17 2017, @12:05AM
"Those ὁι ...", surely that can't be right?
Well, we have to distinguish between "Those ὁι ...", and "These ὁι ...", not to mention the hoi polloi. Demonstratives go fine with articles!
Now we need to get back to Sextus Empiricus' fine work, Adversus Mathematicos. Or consult St. Augustine, who wrote: "Unde concludit: Quapropter bono Christiano sive mathematici, sive quilibet impie divinantium, et maxime dicentes vera, cavendi sunt: ne consortio daemoniorum animam deceptam pacto quodam societatis irretiant." Or was that Aquinas?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 17 2017, @12:17PM
Anyway, thanks for the Greek clarification, I can't think of a construct that works quite the same way as the Greek in any language I am familiar with (and can't pretend to understand the full implications of the "hoi"). In some ways, it does justify the three word phrase you use above, because if neither these hoi polloi nor those hoi polloi are the real hoi polloi, then only the real hoi polloi are *the* hoi polloi?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 15 2017, @03:26AM
Which is plural because it's actually the term for the set of procedures, operations, and properties that can be considered "mathematical".
This isn't correct. Why then, for example, is "logic" singular? The reason, as I note in a more detailed post below, is that English scholars who started borrowing from Greek and Latin after ca. 1500 decided to follow the practice of the grammatical number from the original languages, even though with modern practice it's most common to use the names of fields (mathematics, physics, economics) with SINGULAR verbs in English.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:24AM
Math is also short for mathematics. It makes no sense to re-append the s at the end. It's a very strange practice to abbreviate a word by removing the letters in the middle of the word leaving you with that awkward th to s transition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:04AM
It's a very strange practice to abbreviate a word by removing the letters in the middle of the word
You mean, like abbreviating "cannot" as "can't", omitting "no" in the middle?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:34AM
It's just like in American, the word "statistics" gets abbreviated to "stat".
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 17 2017, @03:45AM
For i18n we should abbreviate it m9s.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday February 15 2017, @06:30PM
Mathematics is an uncountable word meaning "the science (singular) of numbers and their operations".
Now take your alternative definition and go away.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday February 15 2017, @07:11AM
How many maths have you encountered this week?
Today, not this week. Two: algebra and geometry. And logic.
... Three! Algebra, geometry and logic. And calculus.
..... Amongst the maths I've encountered today are: algebra, geometry, logic and calculus.
So it's maths.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:36AM
Maths are my favorite subject.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 16 2017, @04:32PM
However, I was smoking pot at the time and got curious how I was managing to learn from these sequences of rather abstract symbols, so did some epistemics (which I admit is recent coinage, but let's not get side-tracked into linguistics - that's right out).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves