
Rise of the Mathematicians - ubac
https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-rise-of-the-mathematicians
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ncmncm
I guessed that this would be an article about how mathematicians are starting
to become newly important today, with the rise of ML. Most use of mathematics
we rely on, up to the present, is performed by non-mathematicians.

Off by only five centuries...

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not_math
Mathematics is used in statistics, physics, biology, finance, engineering,
medicine, social science and more. Even in the 15th century, most mathematics
was done by non-mathematicans, it's not a new thing.

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lokimedes
To a physicist like me, the assumption that mathematicians are the source of
mathematical revelations is the same as assuming that the best novels are
produced by people who studied english.

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sls
That is by no means an apt metaphor. Mathematicians are in the business of
creating new mathematics, not in studying the "language" in which mathematics
happens to be written. Of course the history of mathematics is replete with
contributions from physicists and others, particularly during the period when
the educated could turn their hand to nearly any such discipline and find a
problem on which progress could be made.

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injb
Yes. In fact it has often been noted by physicists that when they make a new
discovery they sometimes find that mathematicians have been there before them.
Like Einstein and non-euclidean geometry etc.

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ncmncm
It more often goes the other way, and more profoundly.

Group theory.

Laplace transforms were considered an irrelevant curiosity until somebody
figured out they were isomorphic to the wildly effective Heaviside D operator.
Then everyone did their best to bury Heaviside's demonstrations of their
utility, and pretend that Laplace had done all the heavy lifting.

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injb
Group theory was invented by physicists?

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caublestone
Here’s your answer to the question.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#England](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee#England)

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hackermailman
Somewhere is another HN article about all the navigation schools that sprung
up during the time this article discusses, how eventually everything req you
to build technical skills even a contract sailor hundreds of years ago.

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ubac
was it this one? [https://aeon.co/essays/how-european-sailors-learned-
celestia...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-european-sailors-learned-celestial-
navigation)

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yters
Mathematics is the source of Western civilization. Modern science and
technology is descended from philosophy and theology, which started with the
mathematical presocratics and Plato's use of math to argue for unchanging
forms, justifying the pursuit of philosophy in itself.

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empath75
How important were math books in English really? English mathematicians were
reading and writing latin at the time. And would have had access to Euclid
well before that book was written.

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sriku
I kind of like thinkibg of mathematics and language as technology for the mind
- in the sense that both enable you to think thoughts that you otherwise may
not have been able to think .. and to teach others how to do it, thereby
transferring the technology.

