[leftcenterright]

What makes you consider it a "discovery" instead of a creation of us humans?

I am more on the side of seeing maths as a precision language we utilize and extend as needed, especially because it can describe physically non-existent things e.g. perfect circles.

[esperent]

I rather think the discovered/invented thing is just semantics.

You can say that literally anything was "just discovered".

Thriller by Michael Jackson? Those particular ordering of sound waves always theoretically existed, MJ and various sound engineers just discovered them, they didn't create anything.

The cappucino? It's just a particular orderly collection of chemicals, such a collection always theoretically existed. Those baristas are explorers, discovering new latte art shapes, nothing creative there.

Cantor's diagonal argument? Yep, those numbers where just waiting to be discovered and written in that order.

And so on. The entire argument is meaningless, pointless philosophizing. Nobody wastes their time saying latte art was discovered rather than invented, but somehow when it comes to mathematics this is considered a deep and worthy discussion.

[dgfitz]

To me, the difference is: the way to __make__ music was invented, it was already there to be discovered.

Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way.

[esperent]

> Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way

Not at all, you sparked thought in an area I find fascinating (philosophy of maths). Albeit I find this specific topic a bit too commonly discussed relative to how important it is, but I'm still happy to talk about it and share my thoughts.

[bheadmaster]

> Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way.

To me, it doesn't sound like you did. The parent comment of yours just stated, albeit bluntly, that the "invention" and "discovery" are fundamentally the same. Whether we use one or the other depends on how big the size of the space of the possibilities feels to us. Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".

When you invent a way to make music, did you really invent it? Or did you simply discover a particular configuration of atoms that can produce sound when handled in a particular way, that was already there in some platonic universe of ideals? Either way, the end result is the same. Nothing really changes.

[esperent]

> Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".

I think you've made a good point here.

Although, to nitpick a bit: Both spaces (cooking and maths) are infinite, and for most fields of math, uncountably infinite. The difference is in the numbers we are dealing with. For cooking, it's mixtures of trillions of molecules. For maths, it's usually in the order of thousands of symbols (although those ellipses do some infinitely heavy lifting!).

[gowld]

Is TRIZ (and its great-great-grandchildren, LLM GenAI) invention, or discovery? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

[frontfor]

I like to think of axioms as "created" while the consequences (i.e. theorems) of said axioms are "discovered". You can't create logic consequences (conclusions) given a set of axioms, but you can certainly create the axioms (premises).

[mjburgess]

It's not clear to me why people think perfect geometries do not exist, they occur all the time in physics.

Of composite matter, sure, because it's composite in a certain sort of way, you do not get perfect circles. But the structure of macroscopic material does not exhaust the physically.

Even here, one could define some process (eg., gravitational) which drives matter towards being a perfect circle, because perfect circularity is a property of that process. This is, as a matter of fact, true of gravity -- if it weren't we'd observe violations of lorentz invariance, which we do not.

[IAmBroom]

Perfect in a single-body universe, perhaps, but the gravity field of a particle is perturbed by other nearby particles - where "nearby" is relative to precision desired - and therefore never a perfect sphere.

Or, to put it another way, so-called "perfect circles" exist in a real, 4-D, wibbly-wobbly gravity-distorted space, and are no longer perfect Cartesian circles.

They still only exist theoretically; not in practice.

[mjburgess]

Circularity is still a property of the process. One requires perfect circles to describe it.

It is also easy enough to construct circular state spaces, and the like.

The idea that what's real is simply the geometry of macroscopic visible matter, or even of matter alone, is a nonesense.

The world is "immanently abstract", and possess primeness, circularity, etc. in itself -- not as something merely imagined. This is obvious from the physical description of its evolution.

Irregularity, of this kind, is derivative of a geometrical reality. The irregular doesn't govern the irregular, if it did, there would be no structure whatsoever.

[anthk]

Perfect circles just exist on probabily using 2pi for random directions and overall statistics.

[woopsn]

When was the circle discovered? When it became essential to physics?

[mjburgess]

When it was essential to perception. Its necessary to have a model of a circle (, elipse...) in order to correctly parse (at least,) visual perception -- because space is inherently geometrical.