A mathematician's thoughts

Hi,

I wass talking to an old friend and she asked me what maths was all about. Not a surprising question siince I am a mathemtician but one surprisingly hard to answer. bronowski often described maths as a language, especially for science. That is an answer and a surprisingly good one but it isn't the only answer. I think it is the way humans make sense out of the chaos of the physical world, I don't think it says much about us except that it seems to give us a way of progressing. It has been said that maths is unreasobaly effective.

Go back to Newton and think what he was saying. The world is round and is rotationg very fast and rushing through space very fast. Think about it for a minute, it is obviously nuts, we stand here and look out at the world, we aren't going anywhere. But the sums say yes we are and now we can go up in rockets we can see that. But before, why should anyone take it seriously. Because the mathematics all worked out. And once that happens there tends to be a sense that it must be right. When man was sent to the moon all the sums were based on Newtonian idaes and lo and behold it worked, the rockets get where they are gong.

It still is hard to explain what us modern pure mathemticians do. One of the reasons is that most people have idea of any mathematics since Newton & the calculus. It is odd that most people have no knowledge of any mathematics done in the last two hunderd and fifty years. Yet there is probably more mathematics being done now that at any time. You might think it has all been done but luckily that isn't so. There are a number of reasons for this but that will be continued another day and time