How did someone invent math? Why does it work? How does it work for everyone? like how can we say x = 12 if y + x = 5. I want to know how everything works and why it works when its all just some stupid thing a guy made up
Quote from: Denial on November 24, 2003, 02:37 PM
How did someone invent math?
It is the German mathematician Kronecker (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Kronecker.html) who once said, "God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man."
Quote from: Denial on November 24, 2003, 02:37 PM
Why does it work?
Because it has to.
It is the only absolute truth, the only pure form of science, and everything else is based on it.
Quote from: Denial on November 24, 2003, 02:37 PM
How does it work for everyone?
Over the years, humans have come up with methods of preserving the knowledge of mathematics and teaching it to others. Math is an absolute truth - various areas of it "work" for you if you understand them.
Quote from: Denial on November 24, 2003, 02:37 PM
like how can we say x = 12 if y + x = 5.
Because y = -7, duh?
Quote from: Denial on November 24, 2003, 02:37 PM
I want to know how everything works and why it works when its all just some stupid thing a guy made up
It is Moonshine.fe who said,
[22:39:02] <Moonshine.fe> dumbest post of the year award goes to denial.
Math is just something humans made up. Numbers don't really exist... just another thing people made up. It exists because we say it exists.
Math is the only thing whose existence doesn't depend on the universe's existence.
It is an absolute truth. Humans investigated and learned a tiny fraction of it.
Numbers are nothing more than our way of representing values in mathematics which are useful in everyday life or in other sciences. Mathematics isn't about numbers.
The question is how do we know 1+1 = 2? why cant 2 + 2 = 1? How does it all work? and why does it work? it couldnt have always worked. How can you believe in something that people teach you?
Denial: You're bringing up questions that were asked in early 20th century (only they were asked by professional and well known mathematicians, so they sounded much smarter coming from their mouths).
Russell (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/RussellBertrand.html) wrote a 3-volume set of books called Principa Mathematica, which attempts to axiomize mathematics from the ground up (definition of a natural number, etc. - if you read it, expect many pages until you finally get to 1+1=2). Russell's Principa Mathematica is the greatest of this type of work.
Unfortunately, Goedel (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Goedel.html) proved Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoedelsIncompletenessTheorem.html), which states that whenever you base a set theory on axioms (which is unavoidable), there will be statements inside this system that are undecidable (can't be proven and can't be disproven as any result of these axioms or of any proven statements that are derived from the axioms). Also, it is impossible to tell whether a system has paradoxes.
Quote from: Hazard on November 24, 2003, 04:07 PM
Math is just something humans made up. Numbers don't really exist... just another thing people made up. It exists because we say it exists.
Numbers are our way of representing a given value. 1 apple is 1 apple no matter how you count it.
Quote from: j0k3r on November 24, 2003, 07:23 PM
Quote from: Hazard on November 24, 2003, 04:07 PM
Math is just something humans made up. Numbers don't really exist... just another thing people made up. It exists because we say it exists.
Numbers are our way of representing a given value. 1 apple is 1 apple no matter how you count it.
What if I were to come and lick the skin off the apple. What then?
its 1 skinless apple...
It's not so much the concept of the whole apple as it is the concept of 1 object/item.
but the question is how do you know 1 is 1 and who says 1 equals 1? why cant bob = 1? or anything why does 1 have to be 1 thing?
that's the only real reason i hate math i don't get why everything has to be everything and why all these stupid formulas work
Bob is 1, and apple is 1, anything is one. If you have 1 bob and 1 apple, you have 2 objects, count them, 1, 2, I, II, 01, 10...
Without numbers or counting, it would still be 2 objects, you just wouldn't have a way of describing things.
It's just a standardized system used to represent ideas universally. How do you know 'the' doesn't mean 'asshat'? Because it's a standard in English!
although i didn't read this whole thread (math hurts), I think it boils down to:
"Numbers are an abstract representation of a universal concrete concept." -I don't remember and don't care who said that