Is math based on observations?

  • Thread starter Thread starter EL
  • Start date Start date
  • #31
So, when you say Euclidean mathematics, you just mean mathematics.
 
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  • #32
Matt: Is this is a question that you ask me, or what ?
 
  • #33
The very fact that the totality of our sense experience is such that by means of thinking ... it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility". Immanual Kant

"The miracle of appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Wigner

"At this point an enigma presents itself which in all
ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that
mathematics, being after all a product of human thought
which is independent of experience, is so admirably
appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason,
then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able
to fathom the properties of real things?

In my opinion the answer to this question is breifly
this: As far as the laws of mathematics refer to
reality, they are not certain; and as far as they
are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Address to the Prussian Academy of Science 1921, Dr. Einstein
 
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