Did humans invent math? Or has it been in the universe the whole time?

it's also retarded to think that we understand how the universe works and are only supposed to fill in the details by inventing a little moar math

Theres a reason mathematical representations of the physical world can be wrong (ala applying classical physics to quantum mechanics) and it has a lot to do with the fact that as stated in this thread - math is a language. As such, it is of human origin and is used to describe things that are 'natural'.

Also think about axioms in math and how they relate to the real world.

Finally, Matrices can become n-dimensional. How does an n-dimensional plane relate geometrically to the real world? I think string theory only uses about 11 dimensions right?

Math is a language that describes reality. We invented the language, but we didn't invent the reality that informs it.

We do understand a lot about the universe, and our theories are highly mathematical. I'm not saying humans didn't invent any sub-category of math not relevant in the universe - if that's what you're implying with the second half of your sentence.

math doesn't describe reality

The universe does not give a damn about math. It has a bunch of rules and properties that govern how it works. But does not actually sit down to calculate what should happen.

Math was invented by man. It has been used to model the behavior and properties of the universe and to predict the future.

Example, Pi = ratio of circumference of a circle to its' diameter. A circle does not care about this. It just is a property of the circle. The same as my waist line happens to be 32 inches.

>Did humans invent math?
An alien civilization probably did it hundreds of millions of years before life's origin on Earth.

This is a philosophical question, really. Some people describe it as "Platonism". This implies that numbers are real, but are synthetic. It's literally 100% philosophy. It also implies that they exist in an alternate "plane", but in a way, numbers are a completely human construct.

Math can be used to describe reality and for a moment that was its sole purpose.

About 500 years ago mathematicians decided that reality was too trivial and they generalized the universe to invent non-trivial ones.

They have been doing good since then.

Mathematician's universe: For any set A, a relation F can be defined from AxA to A so that for any x and y in A, some z in A exists that is the image of the ordered pair (x,y) through F.

Real life: 1+1=2

Real life is too fucking trivial I tell you

how did you determine that we understand a lot of the universe? science books are heavy, therefore we must understand most of it by now?
the universe is a large place, show some humility and admit that even with the little we've seen and know there are still a lot of paradoxes, unanswered questions and questions which will be asked by the future generations when you die.

also physics is more the department of understanding universes, or rather explaining how they work. math, as you said, goes outside of those boundaries and deals with other things and sub-categories as you say it.

I said a lot. Not most of it or all of it. We determine the validity of a theory by observation and experimentation.

I'm fairly convinced by mathematical realism, so I'm inclined to say math is enitrely independent of human beings. Furthermore, there is a lot of interest in theoretical physicists in a pre-quantum theory that excludes space/time. Accordingly, whatever remains as an object of this inquiry is non-temporal and non-spatial, virtually the definition of a mathematical object. Therefore I also believe that reality itself is mathematical at its root.

godel's incompleteness theorems and mathematical universe hypothesis. google those two.

and, again, how did you determine we understand a lot of it?

Are you trolling? That was literally the next sentence of my post. We observe mathematical patterns in the universe, create mathematical theories based around them, and determine their validity by empirical evidence. This has been successful (i.e., has significant empirical evidence) in describing a lot of the universe.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

finding patterns is in our nature, that does not make it the nature of the universe.

Different guy here, while I completely agree with this I find it somewhat interesting that pattern-finding seems to be the key of intelligence.

We don't just observe patterns. We extrapolate them and test their predictions too, and many predictions have turned out to be true. This is the basis of modern science. How much more evidence would you need before concluding that it is the nature of the universe?

>We don't just observe patterns. We extrapolate them and test their predictions too
That's included.

>and many predictions have turned out to be true.
I'd sure fucking hope so, if we're any good at it.

>How much more evidence would you need before concluding that it is the nature of the universe?
??? non sequitir

How is it a non sequitur? How else would you assert that something is the nature of the universe?

>There are logical relationships between things that are true (i.e. they exist) whether or not humans were ever here.

Can you give an example of such?

So your claim is that patterns inherently exist somewhere out there in nature and therefore so does mathematics because it describes them?

Yes.

humans have a lot of basic tendencies. wanting to organize things and finding patterns is one of them. it's the key to intelligence because it's the easiest to measure.

To add: Not just any patterns, but patterns in the most fundamental aspects of the universe.

Where do they exist? What evidence do you have for there existence, and how do you know that the patterns are not constructs of our minds imposed onto disorder?

If humans 'invented" math, then why are other species capable of doing basic math such as arithmetic?

>Where do they exist?
Gravity, Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetism, almost anything really.

>constructs of our minds imposed onto disorder?

Are you implying
>We can't know nuffin'
?

Math is just a tool to help us interpret and understand the surrounding universe and it's happenings.

Math is an invention used to describe patterns observed by humans in the universe. While we might feel that the patterns are immutable and part of the natural order of things, the language we use to describe them is man made.

No I'm implying the things we know are things we made up that we judge are true within a framework we made up.

Just give up on him. Not everyone is willing to actually think. They like to do and believe as they're told

we only know the animals are doing arithmetic because we invented math, which is a language which describes processes involving numbers

if animals are doing math, they're doing a math that they invented, not the one that we did

Geometry is a model and it relies on axioms. Humans invented geometry. Geometry happens to be a VERY good/near accurate model of what it is intended to model, however.

>Geometry is a model and it relies on axioms. Humans invented geometry. Geometry happens to be a VERY good/near accurate model of what it is intended to model, however.

Agreed. The "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics is really a silly argument. Hammers are good at putting nails in wood because they were expressly designed to do so.

I went to sleep. but where I gave up, another user continued.
I realized there's no arguing him, but I don't think he's not willing to think (might me my motherly instinct though).
the person is probably a lot younger or hasn't read much outside of his textbooks. but he is studying some sort of math which gives him a feel he understands things better then most people.

We invented the way we represent maths i.e. Base 10, the number i, etc.
Maths is entirely abstract, it exists outside the universe, like the version of you that gets laid.

Math wasn't designed, it was discovered.

The universe is math.

I'm It's not as simple as that.
I would say that we've represented maths rather that discovered or invented it, which is kinda a mixture of the two. The reason I say this is because there are many different kinds of maths depending on how you fiddle around with axioms. Non-euclidean geometry came around when we ditched 2 of the euclidean axioms which then made us rethink how space is. Axioms are just things that everyone has agreed upon and are ulitmately limited by our human perspective, so we came to represent maths that way. Remember that with mathematics we can work with nth dimensional shapes which may or may not even be able to exist in our universe.

[spoiler]I'm not even going to talk about Gödel[/spoiler]

Yes I'm a newfag

Report frogposters.

why are you in doubt?

But if the arithmetic they do can be described with our mathematical language, is ther not some abstract pattern underlying both?
Is there no universal concept that is shared by all acts of counting?

I have an idea, the theory of knowledge. It's not really my idea. I came up with part of it through the programming language Clojure. There is the convenience of key : value pairs, used in the language. Well, this is analogous to word : knowledge. Which is entirely functional, this is a mathematical construct, and is inherent without my deduction of it. It is natural to be mathematic, or communicate in general. Math is mostly induced, this way. So some of it is a priori, and some a posteriori. There is a base mathematical object, rationally observing (thinking) it gives us the real math that was already there.

Math is purely human invented abstractions, often of real world phenomena. This is what causes people to feel that math is discovered or inherent to nature.

We are products of math and binary

>Math wasn't designed, it was discovered.
>The universe is math.

Please offer proof for all of these assertions.

No,Physics describes reality, and Math is the language used to do it.

Everyone in this thread is dumb. (no surprise here, this is Veeky Forums).
You're trying to argue a vaguely (intentionally, if OP's image is any indication) worded question without stopping to define the subjects therein, and thus you're arguing in circles as each and every one of you has different definitions of "math" and "the universe" in mind.

[math]p\rightarrow{p}[/math]

this is only "true" because humans have given meaning to "true" and "implies"

a tautology would not exist if humans did not conceive of it and it would have no truth value if humans did not invent truth values.

Humans invented math as a tool to accurately and reliably model reality. Reality existed before humans did though, there's no indication that reality was any different before we were around, the same things happening now happened then, and they will continue to happen if we die off.

[spoiler]:^)[/spoiler]

plato please leave

Math is just a language. Objects exist even if you don't name these objects.

>Objects exist even if you don't name these objects.

Please offer proof of this claim.

We have fossils of various plants and animals which come from times before human beings existed to name them. We've got rocks and various elements which predate the existence of our species, and rocks which predate pretty much all life. They existed before we came around and called them "earth" or "dirt" or "rock". Diamonds formed deep within the earth before humans were around and existed long before we found them and gave them a name or assigned a high value to them. Species of animals existed before we found them, documented them, or named them.

Yeah, I don't deny that physical objects existed before humans did. That's not the claim being made.

Math and numbers don't exist, they are instead abstract functions and representations of quantities devised by humans and only exists within the world of humans and various other living things that require an extremely basic understanding of patterns and/or quantities to survive. The numbers and figures you see in your daily life are merely physical representations of this abstract concept, nothing more, and therefore numbers and mathematics don't exist on their own but the aforementioned representations that humans have become acquainted with are extremely present in our day to day lives.

We're defining pre-existing relationships with manmade symbols.

>Math is a language that describes reality
kek. Math only describes relations between values. There is no "values" in reality. Humans classified those values. We can measure things by count, or by mass, or by energy or by diameter or by color or by shape etc. These categories only lies on our imagination.