Norbert: AoK Mathematics 1: Baking Bread and Lottery Illusion

Baking Bread

Steward is exploring the key similarities of discovery and invention. Discovery to him is research in an area which has a specific answer to a question, and invention is trying to gathering ideas to solve a problem but sometimes it might be lost. To prevent this, we always make assumptions to invent the most we could. 

He also says 2+2=4, no matter what you are counting, from the smallest of ants to the biggest of planets, no matter how abstract it is, and no one should be surprised if it applies to reality. He thinks however that a discovery is useful; we sometimes will find it difficult to apply to our daily life because it only applies to a specific object. One might argue: what is considered as daily life and what is more abstract ideas. It is different to everyone, and it is factual. A scientist might see law of Mathematics a part of everyone’s life, but we might not have thought to create the things we have, mathematics actually plays a bigger part in our lives than we think it does.

What we can learn from these statements is that whilst mathematics is important to everyone, it might be viewed by us that it is more important to someone than to others, and we just have to accept this fact. It is also certainly making a point that mathematics is a discovery; a discovery of specific things in our daily life and not everything. We need to invent ways, and we already have, to help us make assumptions, otherwise we will be stuck.

 

Lottery Illusion

Stewart is claiming the nature has a lot of similarities to mathematics. He used the number of petal a flower usually has to a set of patterns, and from this example he claims mathematics is derived from nature, and we use mathematics to understand nature..  He thinks we also seek these patterns to ‘help us survive’, and that if we didn’t, we would die.

He raised up the question, would another species of living things agree with the mathematics we use? Steward said we might not have the same laws of mathematics because we have different things that surround us. To me, all he has said is very convincing, and rather logical as well. One point that although I agree mathematics helps us understand nature, but I disagree that nature made mathematics exist. In my opinion, mathematics is just a representation (language) of the everything that is physical. This is why I also agree máthema could mean science and mathematics.

What we can see from this section is that nature and mathematics has to be related, that is just a part of our lives. Mathematics let us understand nature, and nature has made us discover Maths, and invent more, and make the world a better place than it already is.