Language of Mathematics - The Meanings of Mathematics

The Meanings of Mathematics

Mathematics is used to communicate information about a wide range of different subjects. Here are three broad categories:

• Mathematics describes the real world: many areas of mathematics originated with attempts to describe and solve real world phenomena - from measuring farms (geometry) to falling apples (calculus) to gambling (probability). Mathematics is widely used in modern physics and engineering, and has been hugely successful in helping us to understand more about the universe around us from its largest scales (physical cosmology) to its smallest (quantum mechanics). Indeed, the very success of mathematics in this respect has been a source of puzzlement for some philosophers (see The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner).

• Mathematics describes abstract structures: on the other hand, there are areas of pure mathematics which deal with abstract structures, which have no known physical counterparts at all. However, it is difficult to give any categorical examples here, as even the most abstract structures can be co-opted as models in some branch of physics (see Calabi-Yau spaces and string theory).

• Mathematics describes mathematics: mathematics can be used reflexively to describe itself—this is an area of mathematics called metamathematics.

Mathematics can communicate a range of meanings that is as wide as (although different from) that of a natural language. As English mathematician R.L.E. Schwarzenberger says:

My own attitude, which I share with many of my colleagues, is simply that mathematics is a language. Like English, or Latin, or Chinese, there are certain concepts for which mathematics is particularly well suited: it would be as foolish to attempt to write a love poem in the language of mathematics as to prove the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra using the English language. - Schwarzenberger (2000)