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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: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday February 15 2017, @03:20AM
Lots of success so maybe the idea that there was really only one mathematic caught on in the US?
This has nothing to do with singular vs. plural. Mathematics is generally treated as singular when referring to the entire discipline, like physics or economics or aerobics. It is simply the name of the field, originally translated as a "plural" in English on analogy with Latin mathematica, which came from the Greek practice of using plural neuter nouns to represent fields of study. As noted here [etymonline.com], words that arrived in English before ca. 1500 (logic, music, arithmetic, etc.) were transliterated into English as singular "-ic" without the "s". But as knowledge of classical languages grew again, English tended to model the grammatical forms of Greek and Latin for new fields. ("Mathematic" was the common term before ca. 1500 in English, but "mathematics" a few centuries later.)
In any case, "mathematics" was standard in both American and British English in the 1800s and 1900s before these two abbreviations became common. "Math" is merely a shortening, like people who say, "I'm taking organic CHEM" or whatever. "Maths" likely derived from the somewhat common 19th-century practice of abbreviating mathematics as "math's" in both American and British English. For whatever reason, the variant forms caught on differently in different places, sometime around 1900. And whether you use mathematics [google.com], math [google.com], or maths [google.com], it's more common to use ALL of them with a singular verb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:30AM
The big difference is that the folks in the UK have rationalized using the less convenient form by referring to it as a plural as there's more than one kind of math. Whereas in the US, we just chopped everything off after the th.
The whole bit about including that extra s is just awkward. th and s are not sounds that we usually put next to each other in English.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:39AM
The whole bit about including that extra s is just awkward. th and s are not sounds that we usually put next to each other in English.
Boths of you is wrong.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 16 2017, @05:02PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves