
Some rather strange history of maths - Hooke
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/some-rather-strange-history-of-maths/
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empath75
The original article seems to be an intentional misunderstanding of what "Math
is everywhere" is generally taken to mean.

The way I interpret it, is that if you study how anything works in enough
detail, there is almost always a way to understand it mathematically.

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dkarapetyan
Correct. We are surrounded by systems and understanding systems is definitely
a mathematical activity.

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alimw
I disagree entirely. Systems that have proved amenable to mathematical
analysis remain relatively few. Pick any one book that aims to describe some
aspect of the world; chances are it won't contain a single formula.

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wodenokoto
And for every topic in those books not containing any formulas there is
another book or paper on that topic with formulas.

~~~
alimw
I must be thinking of a wider range of systems than you are.

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Hooke
A post responding to the Sci Am article "Mathematicians Are Overselling the
Idea That Math Is Everywhere" that was discussed on HN the other week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12304146)

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dkarapetyan
This is a pretty weird argument. You can replace math with physics, chemistry,
or whatever other science you can think of and the argument still goes
through. If his argument is invariant with respect to subject change it means
he's not really addressing anything specific to math but just pointing out
that hard things tend to be exclusive things.

So in essence the people that say "math is everywhere" are trying to
democratize it. Whereas the argument in the SciAm article seems to point to a
more stifled mathematical landscape. I've never seen someone make an argument
"X is elitist" in order to democratize something. If anything people usually
get their pitchforks out and all the folks with an agenda come out of the
woodworks and start using the mob to advance their own goals. In this case I
suspect there are a few folks that would like to kill funding for basic
mathematical research and this guy has started selling them the pitchforks.

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ivan_ah
Michael J. Barany, the OP of the scientificamerican article, wrote a response
to this response:
[http://mbarany.com/ReplyToThonyC.html](http://mbarany.com/ReplyToThonyC.html)
(not very convincing, IMHO, mainly because all the "math is elitist"-arguments
Barany makes are not specific to math, but to any intellectual endeavour. One
could /s/math/writing/g in the whole article and it would continue to make
sense.)

~~~
posterboy
That's an interesting thought. But I don't generally share the resentment
(although I didn't even read the link).

Writing still has to be logical, most of the time. Math papers are verbalized
a lot. You can't draw a fine line between writing (literature) and maths.
That's why the argument still holds. They are both the same thing from a
different perspective, what you called intellect.

Mathematics is the most reduced form, though, and it is maybe more exclusive
by nature, since it is all about learning and abstraction, whereas literature
and language is most basically developed from calls to action, like, literally
developed from calls.

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j2kun
Another response to the same article:
[http://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2016/08/29/dont-
worry-m...](http://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2016/08/29/dont-worry-math-
is-still-everywhere/)

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justinlardinois
Does this strike anyone else as a bit of a circle jerk?

"Hey, this guy in a popular science magazine wrote about how math is so
important, so I'm going to write a blog post about how math is slightly less
important than he said it was."

