How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress

At a profound level, math is the only successful attempt by humanity to speak with precision about things that we can’t point to with our fingers. This is one of the central themes of this book and we’ll come back to it a number of times. In a math book, the most important passages aren’t the theorems or the proofs: they are the definitions. Mathem

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It is beautifully expressed in these striking lines written by Thurston in 2011: “Mathematics is commonly thought to be the pursuit of universal truths, of patterns that are not anchored to any single fixed context. But on a deeper level the goal of mathematics is to develop enhanced ways for humans to see and think about the world. Mathematics is

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“The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official mathematicia... See more