| I see mathematics as completely opposite to studying nature. Mathematicians work on extremely simple objects as a basis. For example (since we're here), give them a 0 and 1, and they will spend 200 years building a whole theoretical world from that, an artificial system they will describe through thousands and thousands of pages of theorems, getting more and more complex as time goes. Nature is an extremely complex system from the start. Trying to understand and describe it is not at all the same approach. You take a complex system (the complexity of the system is given, fixed externally by the nature) and try to simplify it. You can see this difference in the software world too. Mathematicians (CS) will build and favour the use languages which are based on a single simplistic axiom: "everything is a list" for the most famous example, "everything is a function" for others, and then you are supposed to build all the rest on those simplistic bases, and in practice that will mean twisting, bending, squeezing the problem world (i.e. the nature) to make it fit in your model. On the other side, you have programmers, which will more often favour practical, pragmatical languages, which do not exhibit the clean regular, symmetrical simplicity of the former ones, but which are more adapted to describe a complex, irregular world. |