RE: Mathematics An Alien Language?
March 16, 2015 at 4:15 am
(This post was last modified: March 16, 2015 at 4:16 am by Smaug.)
(March 16, 2015 at 3:44 am)I_am_not_mafia Wrote: Maths is a tool created by humans, same as logic.
The reason some people think that it is something more fundamental than a made up tool is because it contains universal constants such as pi. But there are arbitrary assumptions being made in Maths and logic and there are fields that Maths is not suited to, such as emergent phenomena. If Maths and logic was anything more than a tool then we wouldn't have so many different versions such as statistics, geometry, fuzzy logic, predicate calculus, the theory of computation etc.
What I'd love to see is Alien Mathematics and find out how it differed from our own tool.
To add to it, to ones who are even relatively distantly aquainted with modern Math it is clear that there are numerous problems that pose compelling difficulties. And I'm not even speaking of the so-called problems of the millenia. For example there is such thing as convergence of series. Series are widely used for finding and presenting analytical solutions in a vicinity of some point or a generating solution so problems of convergence are not uncommon in different analytical studies. And in most real-life cases it's not possible to solve said problems so the only option selft out for the researchers is numerical computation which has a lot of disadvantages such as drastically narrowing down the amount of data being aquired (analytical solution is generally speaking always better than a numerical one becase the latter doesn't tell nearly as much about the problem being studied). By the way, I'd say that the existance of numerical methods is one of the best examples of the limits not only of the means of computation but also of Math itself.
Alien math is a really interesting topic, indeed. My though is so that since Math to some extent reflects basic features of our Universe (such as the properties of space) it's safe to expect alien math to be at least somewhat equivalent to ours if they have the same laws of Nature as we do (not in terms of physical theories but in terms of actual structure of the Universe).
