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by jknoepfler 7 days ago
The history of mathematics is tightly coupled to spirituality... some more famous examples off the top of my head are Cantor, Euclid, and Euler, but there are probably hundreds of examples of folks who explicitly tied their faith to their research.

I definitely don't think there's anything inconsistent with mathematical and theological thinking. That actually strikes me as a very strange idea?

2 comments

Would those persons mentioned have found themselves in a state of crisis if they were alive today? And it still doesn't touch on the core question: what does math and spirituality really have in common (beyond the extrinsic connection someone may make because they're emotionally overwhelmed by the "beauty" of the golden ratio appearing in nature, for example)?
Probably they wouldn't be. A lot of this is people catastrophizing. Probably already somewhat unhappy even before.

Regarding spirituality i think it's more about math itself than math as a discipline. Math might be divine. Even if math is divine, i think doing math doesnt make you more spiritual.

In what way could math be divine? What does "divine" even mean in this context?
Ramunajan a particularly notable example.