What Is Math?

What is Math?

Mathematics is everywhere and we all learned it at some point, but what is mathematics, really? A search on the internet will yield many different interpretations. According to Google, mathematics is “the abstract science of number, quantity, and space.” Here is a collection of how some of history’s greatest minds described mathematics.

An intellectual game “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”—David Hilbert

“Pure mathematics is the world’s best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It’s free. It can be played anywhere—Archimedes did it in a bathtub.”—Richard J. Trudeau

“Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.”—Vi Hart

“Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.”—Plato

“Mathematics is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.”—William Woods Worth

A tool for the sciences “Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.”—Paul Dirac

“Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.”—Max Tegmark

“Mathematics serves as a handmaiden for the explanation of the quantitative situations in other subjects …”—H. F. Fehr

“In order to understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”—Galileo

A search for pattern, order, and structure “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”—G. H. Hardy

“Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”—Joseph Fourier

“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”—Dean Schlicter

Logic and reasoning “All Mathematics is Symbolic Logic.”—Bertrand Russell

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” –Albert Einstein

“Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.“—Tobias Dantzig

Which do you believe best describe math?

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The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?

One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that!

In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.

Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:

Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe?

To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.

Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.

When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions.

Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.

According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.