# I Is math an actual language?

#### frankin garcia

Could you translate any and all forms of math to english, spanish, german, whatever needed

#### phinds

Gold Member
Could you translate any and all forms of math to english, spanish, german, whatever needed
You can "read" any equation into most any language but often it is NOT a good "translation". There are things that the math says that are somewhere between difficult and impossible to express in human language. The best example I can think of is the pop-science "explanation" for Hawking Radiation, which goes like this: virtual particles pop in and out of existence just outside the event horizon and one of them falls in and the other escapes, thus reducing the overall mass of the black hole by a tiny amount. Hawking himself has said that that "explanation" was just a heurestic (not a real explanation, more like an analogy) that he came up with because it was as close as he could come to expressing the math in English.

#### PeroK

Homework Helper
Gold Member
2018 Award

Rough translation:

Let there be light!

#### DaveC426913

Gold Member
You can "read" any equation into most any language but often it is NOT a good "translation". There are things that the math says that are somewhere between difficult and impossible to express in human language.
I interpreted the OP's question the other way 'round.

Can you express any human language message in mathematical form?

Although, I think that question is distinct from the question in the subject line.

#### WWGD

Gold Member
Math is not a language in the sense of other human languages as German, French, etc. as it has a specific subject matter( unlike human languages which are general-purpose). It _uses_ a language, a symbolic one ,to communicate its content.

Last edited:

#### Mark44

Mentor
Could you translate any and all forms of math to english, spanish, german, whatever needed
I believe so.
Any collection of mathematics symbols can be translated into whatever human language is desired, provide that the language includes the concepts that are being discussed. (Some languages don't have words for numbers larger than two, or so I've heard.)

For example, the simple equation "2 X 3 = 6" would be read by a Spanish speaker as "dos por tres son seis."
A more complicated example might be $\sqrt{x^2 + y^2}$ which could be read in English as "the square root of the sum of the squares of x and y."

Mathematics symbols are shortcut abbreviations for words in English, Spanish, German, or whatever other human language the readers speak.
I interpreted the OP's question the other way 'round.
Which is not what the OP asked. There's a big difference between translating a math expression or equation into a particular language, and translating some phrase or sentence into mathematics symbols.

#### DaveC426913

Gold Member
Which is not what the OP asked.

A less interesting question, IMO.

#### Stephen Tashi

Could you translate any and all forms of math to english, spanish, german, whatever needed
There have been, and are, English, Spanish, and German mathematicians who expressed their mathematical thoughts in their native languages. Is that what you're asking about?

#### Ibix

I suspect that the context for this is a recently closed thread of the OP's.

I agree that you can express a mathematical expression in any language that has the necessary symbols. But, as @phinds notes, sometimes the concepts being expressed are nigh-impossible to explain in natural language.

#### frankin garcia

This website is fertile af with potential,
So we can say math in english.. does this me we can solve any math problem just by talking about it, no papers or pencil, no calculators, just 2 human mouths, is this possible?

Last edited by a moderator:

#### DaveC426913

Gold Member
So we can say math in english.. does this me we can solve any math problem just by talking about it, no papers or pencil, no calculators, just 2 human mouths, is this possible?
Sure.

Having connected each pair of geometric vertices of an n-dimensional hypercube to obtain a complete graph on 2n vertices, and having coloured each of the edges of this graph either red or blue, what is the upper bound (not the lower bound) on the smallest value of n for which every such colouring contains at least one single-coloured complete subgraph on four coplanar vertices?

No pencils, pen or calculators allowed.
Talk amongst yourselves.

(Hint: It's large.)

#### Mark44

Mentor
So we can say math in english.. does this me we can solve any math problem just by talking about it, no papers or pencil, no calculators, just 2 human mouths, is this possible?
This is different from what you asked in the opening post. To answer your question, some problems are so complicated that it wouldn't be possible for two humans to keep all the steps in mind without writing them down.