Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.
But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.
As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.
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