Weekly Blogpost #17

Sunday, December 8th, 2013

Questioning the certainty of Math

I will take the opportunity of this post to answer your question about whether it is a good or a bad thing to question the certainty of math. At least in my opinion.

As a confession, I have to say I had felt somewhat shattered when I first came upon this realization. "Wait, so the only subject where I was sure everything I would do, all the solutions I come up with, are certain and absolutely right may actually not be so?". But then, as I thought about it more, I was happy and became increasingly drawn to math because of its questionable quality. If math was all certainty, there would not be experts and professors seeking new properties under the name of math. We would already know all the answers, all the formulas, and there would be no need for more. 

Many people during our last class's discussion raised the idea that math was everywhere, found in nature. I partly agree with this claim, yet disagree a little as well. As I had said before, the concepts of math are found in nature. Look at a snail's shell or leaves: perfect geometry. Consider the universe: reflected in the concepts of infinity. Examine the half-lives, or cellular fission: there will not be a nothingness, a "zero", as there is matter left all the time when the particles separate in half (the only way to obtain zero is by having zero at the beginning, in the numerator, of the division). But then, had we not given these mathematical terms, these names, to the processes we find, would we be able to talk about math? We would be describing the terms and the concepts in question, yet they would not be under the language we use when we are mathematically speaking. Math is still a language, and therefore, the way that we communicated in math has been invented by us. Though the concepts have been discovered, the name that we give the concepts, the way that we communicate what we have discovered and found and encountered, have been thought up by us. 

The uncertainty in math gives us the curiosity to do math. If math were an absolute paradigm of only truths, there would not be the need to look for the answers. We would just have to grab a book, or a record, that contains all the answers that we seek in order to get to the truth, the knowledge that we are seeking for. The uncertainty of the concepts behind math combined with the unquestionable logical reasoning behind mathematical processes are the magical components of math that may enchant us, or maybe inspire fear in us.