I mean, mathematics are an invention. A useful one, sure, but the whole thing is just made up by people playing around with numbers and going “what if we had a new, different kind of numbers…”
This reminds me of a friend who said “I like to think of dividing by zero as giving zero instead of infinity, because it means you can keep doing math on it” and I just thought that was so pure.
I mean, mathematics are an invention. A useful one, sure, but the whole thing is just made up by people playing around with numbers and going “what if we had a new, different kind of numbers…”
if we play around with it and find out we can better describe how reality works it is not strictly made up
some of it anyway and maybe all with a better understanding
That’s when it stops being maths and becomes science
sure but if the discovery was done in pure math and only later was the relevance found?
This reminds me of a friend who said “I like to think of dividing by zero as giving zero instead of infinity, because it means you can keep doing math on it” and I just thought that was so pure.
there are number systems that work differently