Math is called the language of the universe and is civilization’s greatest achievement.

Science and math

Numerical activities of animals.

It best explains the universe as we see.

The physical world doesn’t just have some mathematical properties but has only mathematical
properties.

The great math mystery.

We look at nature and search for patterns. Eons ago, we gazed at the sky and discovered patterns we
call constellations. Even coming to believe that they might control our destiny. We watch the days turn
to nights and back to day, and seasons as they come and go. And we called that pattern; time. We see
symmetrical patterns in the human body and the tiger stripes and build those patterns into what we
create, from art, to our cities.

What do pattern tell us?

Spirals

Scientists turn to a powerful tool called math in order to understand our world. They quantify
information and use mathematical techniques to examine them, hoping to discover the underlying
cause of nature’s rhythms and regulations.

Revealed the secrets behind the elliptical orbits of our plants to the electromagnetic waves that
connects our cellphones. Math guided the way and lead us to the subatomic building blocks of matter.

Flowers petals, 3,5,34,55 and these numbers occur very often. Fibonacci sequence by Leonardo Picasso
Bogollo. This progression is fascinating because it can be observed in the human beauty, to the stock
market. Though a lot about these sequence remained unproven, it still appears frequently in nature.
Evolution seems to favor these numbers.

Pine cones spiral, sunflower heads spiral. Plants don’t need to know math. The mysterious connections
between the physical wold and mathematics run deep. Pi= ration of circle’s circumference and its
diameter. Its decimal value go on forever without a repeating pattern. 12.1 trillion digits. Pi is often used
in probability. Sound and light waves, path of rivers, brightness of supernova. Pi is one example of a
vast, interconnected web of mathematics that seems to reveal an often hidden and deep order to our
world.

Max tegmark – saw similarities in our world and that of a computer game. Because the laws of physics in
a game are only mathematical rules created by a programmer. The entire language of a computer game
are ultimately just numbers and equations. He thinks that the world we live in is not that different from
the software of a game. Math works so well to describe realities because math is all that it is, there’s
nothing else. Math doesn’t just describe our physical realities it actually is our physical realities because
the world has only has mathematical properties. Pr is a bit like a digital photograph. When we zoom into
it, we see that it is a field of pixels each represented by three numbers that specified the amount of
green, red and blue. Universe may seem vast and complex but its underlying mathematical structure is
simple and can be explained by 32 numbers along with a handful of mathematical equations, the
fundamental laws of physics. And it all fits in a wall but there are still questions.

Pythagoras

Stories say that he explored the infinity between music and reality. Music is parallel to mathematics.
Notes- active, fifth, fourth. Music is math in some way when we measure the lengths of some waves.
Simple ratios produce harmonious sounds was proof of a hidden in the natural world and that order was
made of numbers.

simple ratio can be observed from the 2:1 ratio of hydrogen atoms to oxygen atoms in water to the
number of times the moon orbits the earth compared to its own rotation. 1:1 or that mercury rotates
three times when it orbits the sun twice, 3:2 ratio.

Plato

Geometry and mathematics exist in their own ideal world.

Platonic solids:

Cube- earth

Tetrahedron – fire

Octahedron- air

Icosahedron-water

Dodecahedron- cosmos as a whole

Plato’s mathematical forms were the ideal of the world around us and they existed in their own realm.

Scientist believe that when they are doing math, they are just uncovering something that is already out
there.

Math chudnovsky, james gates jr., dusa mcDuff

Math is discovered. When someone making new mathematics, it feels like there’s something there
before you get to it. Math is discovered rather than invented because were discovering something about
the way our minds work in interaction with the world.

Math geniuses proves that math is all in their head. Is prowess in math a result of teaching and constant
practice or is the foundation of math built in to our brains.

Lemurs are related to humans to a common ancestor that lived as many as 65 million years ago. They
share similar characteristics to early primates, making them a window, a blurry one to our ancient past.
Their special studies came up to a result that lemurs and other monkeys can learn to pick the right
answer. Even without mathematical education, we would still have a primitive number sense which
seems to be a very important foundation and without it, it is questionable as to if we could ever
appreciate symbolic mathematics. Building blocks of mathematics maybe preprogrammed to our brains
like a part of a basic toolkit for survival. Like our abilities to recognize patterns and shapes, or our sense
of time, from that point of view, we’ve erected one of the greatest inventions of human culture,
mathematics.

If math is all in our heads,

Why?

Math through science, technology and engineering, math has been very effective in transforming the
planet, allowing us to go into the beyond.

NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California in 2012, managed to land a car-sized rover on Mars. They
used the law of falling bodies that is a groundbreaking discovery from the renaissance that turned
mathematics into the language of science. Aristotle thought that heavier objects fall faster than lighter
ones, which makes sense on the surface. The rate of which things would fall is directly proportional to its
weight and this principle was used for nearly 2,000 years until it was challenged in the late 1500 by the
late Italian mathematician, Galileo Galilei. Legends say that he discovered that Aristotle’s theory was
proven wrong after dropping two different cannon balls in terms of weights from a tower. Dropping
feathers and hammers is misleading due to air resistance. If we take air out of the equation, everything
falls at the same rate and this was demonstrated on the moon in 1971 during the Apollo 15 mission. A
scientist dropped a feather and a hammer and they reached the ground at the same time. Galileo made
an interesting discovery that the rate of which objects fall from a distance is almost the same when we
drop it from a distance that is twice as much as the first one. So he created a ramp and discovered the
relationship between the distance and time. He proved that falling objects follow mathematical laws.
The distance the ball traveled is directly proportional to the square of the time and it is a mathematical
explanation of the physics of our universe. Math could be used to uncover and discover the hidden rules
of our world. His discovery or insight was profound and he later wrote that the universe is written in the
language of mathematics. Math turned math equations into laws of science.

Math follows mathematical patterns.

Isaac Newton published a book in 1687 that became a landmark in the history of science known as the
principia. He gathered observations from around the world and explained them using math. His
groundbreaking insight was that the force that sets the comets hovelling around the sun was the same
force that brought cannon balls back to earth, the force behind Galileo’s laws of falling bodies. It even
hold the planets in their own orbits and he called the force, gravity. He described it in a surprisingly
simple and precise equation that explains how two masses attract each other, whether here on earth or
in the heavens above. The law of gravity still applies even throughout the visible universe. Some of the
world’s greatest minds have been amazed by the way math permeates the universe.

Albert Einstein initially thought that math is the product of human thought and wondered how math
does so well in explaining the universe as we see it. They coined this phrase the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics. The fact that math can really describe the universe so well in particular
physical laws is a gift that we neither understand nor deserve.

For nearly 200 years ago, Uranus was seem to go off track and scientists trusted the math and calculated
that it was being pulled by another unseen planet, so they discovered Neptune. It has accurately
discovered a previously unknown planet. Math gives us the answer it is like having a server that is far
more capable than you are and it carries us to the truth and the final answer.
Television, radio, cellphones, satellites, wifi, gps and remote use visible waves of energy to communicate
and no one knew that they existed until it was discovered by James Maxwell, a Scottish mathematical
physicist. In 1860’s he published a set of equations that explains the relationship between electricity and
magnetism, how each could generate the other. With electricity and magnetism together, we could
produce waves of energy that could travel through space in the speed of light called electromagnetic
waves.

The promising attempt to find the waves predicted by Maxwell happened in Northern Italy by Guillermo
Marconi. His process starts by a series of sparks and the burst of electricity creates a momentary
magnetic field which in turn generates a momentary electric field which creates another magnetic field.
The energy cycles between the two propagating an electromagnetic wave. He stepped up his game and
built a big antenna beside the house to amplify the waves coming from spark generator then he asked
his brother and an assistant to carry a receiver across the state to a far side of a nearby hill. They have a
shotgun which they will fire if they managed to pick up the signal. And it worked the signal has been has
been detected and over a mile, it was the farthest transmission to date. In less than 10 years, Marconi
sent signals across the Atlantic. When the titanic sank, we was personally credited for saving many lives
because of his equipment allowed the signals to be transmitted. Thanks to Maxwell’s discovery, Marconi
was able to harness a hidden part of our world, ushering in an era of wireless communication.

Atoms

Electron –

Proton +

Neutron

Math lead the way to the discovery of numerous particles.

The discovery of the higgs particles would be proof of the Higgs field which is a cosmic molasses that
gives us stiff about the word, mass which we usually experience as weight. Without mass, everything
would all be traveling in a speed of light and would never combine to form atoms. This particle was such
an important foundation of physics that it was later named the god particle. In 2012, Higgs and his
colleagues’ prediction was proven and it was recognized as one of the greatest predictions ever made.

While math may seem the language of the universe, it is easy to overlook where they don’t work that
well like in weather forecasts. In a longer forecast, small errors grow into big ones that is why experts
only predicts the weather on a weekly basis. Daily weather is too complex and chaotic for precise
modelling. Same as the behavior of water boiling on a stove or even the stock market. Biological
systems, economic systems get difficult to be modeled with math. So math can be reasonably
ineffective.

Engineers

The elegance of math meets the messiness of reality and practicality rules the day. Mathematicians deal
in the domain of the absolute while engineers live in the domain of the approximate. they are interested
in practicality and s they try to omit terms and equations to get things that are simple enough to suit our
purposes and then meet our needs. Many of the greatest engineering achievement were built using
mathematical shortcuts, simplified equations that approximate an answer trading some precision for
practicality. For them, approximate is close enough to take us to mars.

Many physicists see an uncanny accuracy on how math can reveal the secrets of the universe making it
seem to be an inherent part of nature. Meanwhile engineers have to sacrifice the precision of
mathematics to make it useful making it seem more like an imperfect tool of our own invention.

Math is both a great invention and a discovery. It is an intricate combinations of inventions and
discoveries. People abstracted everything to the number two. Two became an inventive concept as to
other natural numbers. Discovering that these numbers have intricate relationships, were the
discoveries. We invented the concept but discovered the relations among all these concepts.

The answer to this remains as the great math mystery.

Adam Steltzner – head of engineer of the project