ftfy

proof that numbers were created by humans?

that deserves a thread of it's own, is maths inherent?

proof that they weren't?

Like are you implying other animal species use numbers? in what way?

Or is there a point in the known historical record that you can point that shows illogical leaps in knowledge that would imply numbers were learned? For instance they extend beyond the written record in NA, such as with prehistorical societies like the Olmec and Mississippian cultures. We have both numerical records of leaders with given calendar years and trade ledgers with numerical records. None of these cultures are within the historical record but we have artifacts with numbers on them from this era, so I'm not sure you would have enough info to validate a gap in knowledge to imply a leap in technology, and surely before cultures such as Olmec there is almost literally no record.

^ zz humans use numbers to represent maths, numbers were clearly created by man even if we can't find the exact origin
a monkey uses maths when he picks up a second banana, the linearity of addition is the basic building block of all mathematics

This is like asking me for proof that the alphabet was created by humans.

Not really. The alphabet corresponds to a created language whereas numbers are a universal value regardless of the notation. "A" in english isn't truly equivalent to "A" in any other language, its congruent.

In short, numbers have always been there to discover whereas an alphabet inherently must be created. There is some inherent value to language given the range of sounds humans can make with their mouth and tongue but it only takes an example such as a rolled "R" in spanish to see how shaky that logic is.

I consider it quite possible that mathematical learning was pushed along by some aliens, but if it happened it would have to be too far back in the historical record to verify, so the point is moot.

Well they had to be taught to you x 100000 generations = animals dont count by nature.

"God created the integers, all else is the work of man."

— attributed to Leopold Kronecker.

Math: Discovered, Invented, or Both?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/04/great-math-mystery/

This post was edited by card_sultan on Sep 26 2016 12:21pm

So in short you believe that math may have been "given" to humans in a prehistory time period?

I think that's possible, but unverifiable.

Maybe that's what Eve saw when she bit into the apple? "Evil Numbers" [thats suppose to be an oxymoron]


years ago _ I read this story about one of the greatest Mathematician ever - he was some kid from India - who was never educated in math - he simply got his math from dreams. Forget what his name was, but ill look it up.

Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar (1887-1920) India

Like Abel, Ramanujan was a self-taught prodigy who lived in a country distant from his mathematical peers, and suffered from poverty: childhood dysentery and vitamin deficiencies probably led to his early death. Yet he produced 4000 theorems or conjectures in number theory, algebra, and combinatorics. While some of these were old theorems or just curiosities, many were brilliant new theorems with very difficult proofs. For example, he found a beautiful identity connecting Poisson summation to the Möbius function. Ramanujan might be almost unknown today, except that his letter caught the eye of Godfrey Hardy, who saw remarkable, almost inexplicable formulae which "must be true, because if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them." Ramanujan's specialties included infinite series, elliptic functions, continued fractions, partition enumeration, definite integrals, modular equations, gamma functions, "mock theta" functions, hypergeometric series, and "highly composite" numbers. Ramanujan's "Master Theorem" has wide application in analysis, and has been applied to the evaluation of Feynman diagrams. Much of his best work was done in collaboration with Hardy, for example a proof that almost all numbers n have about log log n prime factors (a result which developed into probabilistic number theory). Much of his methodology, including unusual ideas about divergent series, was his own invention. (As a young man he made the absurd claim that 1+2+3+4+... = -1/12. Later it was noticed that this claim translates to a true statement about the Riemann zeta function, with which Ramanujan was unfamiliar.) Ramanujan's innate ability for algebraic manipulations equaled or surpassed that of Euler and Jacobi.
Ramanujan's most famous work was with the partition enumeration function p(), Hardy guessing that some of these discoveries would have been delayed at least a century without Ramanujan. Together, Hardy and Ramanujan developed an analytic approximation to p(), although Hardy was initially awed by Ramanujan's intuitive certainty about the existence of such a formula, and even the form it would have. (Rademacher and Selberg later discovered an exact expression to replace the Hardy-Ramanujan approximation; when Ramanujan's notebooks were studied it was found he had anticipated their technique, but had deferred to his friend and mentor.)

In a letter from his deathbed, Ramanujan introduced his mysterious "mock theta functions", gave examples, and developed their properties. Much later these forms began to appear in disparate areas: combinatorics, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and even knot theory and the theory of black holes. It was only recently, more than 80 years after Ramanujan's letter, that his conjectures about these functions were proven; solutions mathematicians had sought unsuccessfully were found among his examples. Mathematicians are baffled that Ramanujan could make these conjectures, which they confirmed only with difficulty using methods not available in Ramanujan's day.

Many of Ramanujan's results are so inspirational that there is a periodical dedicated to them. The theories of strings and crystals have benefited from Ramanujan's work. (Today some professors achieve fame just by finding a new proof for one of Ramanujan's many results.) Unlike Abel, who insisted on rigorous proofs, Ramanujan often omitted proofs. (Ramanujan may have had unrecorded proofs, poverty leading him to use chalk and erasable slate rather than paper.) Unlike Abel, much of whose work depended on the complex numbers, most of Ramanujan's work focused on real numbers. Despite these limitations, some consider Ramanujan to be the greatest mathematical genius ever; but he ranks as low as #20 because his work lacked great influence.

Because of its fast convergence, an odd-looking formula of Ramanujan is sometimes used to calculate π:
992 / π = √8 ∑k=0,∞ ((4k)! (1103+26390 k) / (k!4 3964k))



This post was edited by card_sultan on Sep 26 2016 12:53pm