Neil Degrasse Tyson - Is Math A Discovery Or An Invention?

[jayyemm]

The way Neil didn’t even want to comment on the discovention, so he just kept on talking but was interrupted by singing instead so he tried to talk through that and couldn’t… he paused for one second and then just continued his sentence as if nothing had happened 😂😂😂

[shades]

It’s an interpretation above all else. Our ability to use it, is biased on our ability. It’s like language, we invented it and use it to understand the world around us.

[daleburnfart]

Think about how silly it would be to say Isaac Newton invented gravity... It was always there at a very specific reliable value making it a discovery. I believe math also is a discovery in the same way that 4 bananas plus 4 bananas always equaled 8 bananas. We just discovered a way to explain it. To invent math means you could assign any value to anything you want and call it true despite the entire universe laughing at you.

[markuspfeifer]

The one thing that everyone misses in that debate is that we first have to agree on an ontology of math in order to tell if math is discovered or invented. We cannot tell if the structures preexist or come into existence as we start thinking about them as long as we didn’t agree on what we mean by „existing“.

The major difficulty here is that physicists and many others have a hard time accepting any non-physical mode of existence. But for math, it is kind of a prerequisite.

Mathematical statements are statements that acquire a truth value simply from definitions. The statement „all bachelors are unmarried“ is true by definition of the word „bachelor“ (an unmarried man). But notice how we do not require that any physical Bachelors exist for that sentence to be true. We could be in a universe where men aren’t a thing and consequently there are no bachelors, but the sentence would still have the same truth value as it does in our universe.

When mathematicians say that their objects of study exist in an abstract sense, it is *this* what they mean. The truth values of their statements are independent of physical reality, they pre-exist. I have yet to hear any good arguments against this.

Many mathematicians go a step further though and they claim that then there must in some sense be those things that the statements are about. I do see how that notion is not above criticism, but I can also see the appeal of that notion.

[CousinLouisDaFreshPrince]

Neil is right, math is an infinite language that describes itself and only itself using patterns. It’s nether discovered nor invented. Its explanation can only be revealed by mathematics itself, no word in our conscious vocabulary can define it. It just describes itself in every equation.

[aldrinmilespartosa]

Its probably be the same as the light debate were two sides argued that light is a wave or light is a particle but end up being both correct.

[rjrastapopoulos]

Mathematics is fascinating. It's incomplete. We don't know whether it is consistent or not. Yet it helps people to understand reality.

[nickb]

Dude gave his son an ultimatum between math and astrophysics LOL

[nightone]

"In order to get ahold of the wiggly world you've gotta put a net over it" - And so, the the art of calculus was born.
Now we can number the holes of the net, so many so holes up, so many so holes across, and now we can measure, calculate, and talk about the wiggly world in regards to the net. The funniest part of all is that as human beings we tend to try and straighten out the wiggly world and build in straight lines with right angles, but each and every one of us is wiggly as all get out. The wiggliest wiggle of them all tries to straighten out a wiggly world. Lol
This is Alan Watts by the way. One of his philosophical lectures on calculus and the universe. It is wonderful.

[goodmoodgaming]

This reminds me of the question who came first the chicken or the egg.

[bell]

Intro chat ends at 0:57, it took 24% of total clip time :-(

[laxikabisht]

what all went before the math book got published ( from whatever little a highschooler could gain)
-nature reveals
- humans capture (this is where the invention comes ) through symbols
-understand ( " things around us will do what they are doing whether we understand them or not ")
-understanding enables us to control
- which helps us in utilizing.

and why look so far behind and into something so big such as the the pyramids - maths is in our hands.
*if we wouldn't have discovered the chaos around us we wouldn't have invented methods to place them in order*


many a times when maths seems way to incomprehensible to me these lines calm my nerves

'these are a set of rules -discovered
and what has been discovered though can be questioned but has no answer, so why not just leave it at that.'

AND

'maths is not something you understand but something you get used to'

[guerrillaj]

It had to be discovered. It just fits so perfectly

[alanweis]

I have learned a lot of wisdom from old tales and religious quotes with a deep meaning my favourite was this, and I write it in hungarian because it sounds better: "Az ember tudatlannak születik, nem ostobának, ostobává az oktatás teszi". This sums up the operation we have here very well. The other thing I have learned when I went down alone to an illegal underground party was "sacred geometry". So, those people who exist behind the door says "do not enter" is actually people who possess wisdom that is sacred. You guys are doing media here. You not gonna know the world behind closed doors. You shouldn't.

[kennyalbano]

Related question for other commenters: are birds invented or discovered? Every single bird like every living thing on this planet can be said to be directly descended from its parents in many cases parent. Yet there exists an unbroken chain connecting every life on Earth to the same first ancestor. That bird had a mom who was a bird of a particular species however many generations is hard to give an exact answer and can only be given by an approximation. At some point most biologists would likely claim a bird of one species had an ancestor that belonged to a different species. This same reasoning can be applied beyond bird species to every species on Earth in the same manner. We may be comfortable saying a given individual is a bird of a given species but the species is less easily defined. It is real in that it is useful as a way to understand the world and to develop further ideas related to life, the animal kingdom, and birds, but it could be argued the bird was an invention despite agreeing with measurements and experiments. The bird is an abstraction that repeatedly produces results that correspond to reality yet I would argue is a human invention the same way math is. Math is a tool with great agreement and correspondence with nature. On the other hand there can be multiple systems of axioms on which a branch of mathematics may rest. Do all such systems of axioms including even those that may not correspond with reality have their own independent truth even if they are untestable or if they were to fail repeated experimentation? Does math have a standard of truth separate from that of science? Would you say she blinded me with math? 😉

[WaveFunctionCollapsed]

Math : Discovered
Numbers : invented

[jgilgorri]

Math is a pidgin between the language of the universe and the language of our minds.

[shyshka_]

Fundamental math concepts are most definetly discovered, more abstract models and number theory and so on just might be invented on top of that. Like the Pythagorean theorem would still exist even if humans never existed, concepts of geometry would still be the same, Pi would still be the same.. etc.

[LMcmacdaddy]

I don't like Neil's response here, all he did was move the question back a step... we can now ask: 'Is language invented or discovered?'

[barabbasrosebud]

Discovery and invention are the same in this interactive MMORPG viz. "Discovention". Tyson is much smarter than I thought.