Home
Authors
Subjects
Resources
Contact
About
|
|
|
Mathematics
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
~The mathematical
sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the
greatest forms of the beautiful.
|
|
|
-Aristotle
Metaphysica
3-1078b
|
|
|
~Do you know what the
foundation of mathematics is? The foundation of mathematics is numbers.
If anyone asks me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow
and ice and numbers. And do you know why? Because the number system is
like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are
whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness
expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the
mathematical expression is for longing ... The negative numbers. The
formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human
consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the
in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones,
between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to?
It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational
numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond
reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And
produces irrational numbers ... It's a form of madness. Because the
irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force
human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers
to rational numbers, you get real numbers ... It doesn't stop. It never
stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with the
imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't
picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And
when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex
number system. The first number system in which it's possible to explain
satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast, open
landscape. The horizons. You head toward them and they keep receding.
|
|
|
-Smilla Jasperson, a character in Peter Høeg's
Smilla's Sense of Snow, 1992
Tiina Nunnely, trans.
|
|
|
Mathematics is as little a science as grammar
is a language.
|
|
|
-Ernst Mayr
|
|
|
 top
|
|
|
