#what is math?

[jaedoesart]

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[mathblab]

If I were giving a talk on “what is mathematics,” I would already have answered you. Mathematics is looking for patterns.

— Richard Feynman

[mathblab]

As the science of abstract patterns, there is scarcely any aspect of our lives that is not affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by mathematics; for abstract patterns are the very essence of thought, of communication, of computation, of society, and of life itself.

— Keith Delvin

[mathblab]

[Mathematics is] a very powerful and effective language invented by humans to describe and discover patterns in nature. When we perceive beauty in the mathematics, I think what we’re really perceiving is an underlying beauty in nature itself.

— Jim Baggott, Quantum Space

[mathblab]

Mathematicians have constructed a very large number of different systems of geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, of one, two, three, or any number of dimensions. All these systems are of complete and equal validity. They embody the results of mathematicians' observations of their reality, a reality far more intense and far more rigid than the dubious and elusive reality of physics. The old-fashioned geometry of Euclid, the entertaining seven-point geometry of Veblen, the space-times of Minkowski and Einstein, are all absolutely and equally real.

G. H. Hardy

[mathblab]

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

Hannah Arendt

[mathblab]

"For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?"

--Richard Courant