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by d_tr
1594 days ago
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> they don't necessarily have to correspond with anything real, ... I would just say they correspond to encoded thought processes, encoded reasoning. If you can take a thought process and describe it in terms of sets and relations (i.e. subsets with certain properties), you have a mathematical structure and you can start trying to prove theorems. You spend time thinking about a problem, then hopefully you start recognizing patterns, then you take the reasoning, clean it up, abstract it and generalize it to increase its ultimate utility, and package it for others to reuse and build upon. > everything that works is called math It is just fortunate that people have been able to "package" a lot of stuff this way. Like Riemann did with his geometry for example. It is not that mathematicians just decide to "take over" everything. |
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