Is God a Mathematician?

by Mario Livio
“The universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.”
– James Jeans (1877-1946), British physicist

“God created the natural numbers, all else is the work of man.”
– Leopold Kronecker (1823-91), German mathematician

Our universe is not just described by mathematics – it is mathematics.”

– MIT astrophysicist Max Tegmark

Mathematics is the language of the universe; literature is the articulation of the

soul. – Patrick Ivers

“When physicists wander through nature’s labyrinth, they light their way by
mathematics – the tools they use and develop, the models they construct, and the
explanations they conjure are all mathematical in nature.” – Mario Livio

Beginning as far as we know with the Greek philosopher & mathematician Pythagoras
(ca570-ca490 BCE) of Samos & his disciples, the Pythagoreans – “generally credited
with the discovery that dividing a string by simple consecutive integers produces
harmonious and consonant intervals … the mathematical ratios that underlie the harmony
of the musical scale” & “among the first to maintain that the Earth was spherical in form
… also probably the first to state that the planets, the Sun, and the Moon have an
independent motion of their own from west to east, in a direction opposite to the daily
(apparent) rotation of the sphere of the fixed stars” – “the forefathers of the search for
cosmic order” & “the founders of pure mathematics,” arose the passionate belief that
“mathematics was real, immutable, omnipresent, and more sublime than anything that
could conceivably emerge from the feeble human mind.” Promulgated by Plato (429-347
BCE) as belonging “to abstract objects that dwell in an ideal world that is the home of
true forms and perfections” from which “we gain absolutely certain and objective
knowledge” & first formalized (documenting the tradition of the Pythagoreans) by the
“Father of Geometry” Euclid (ca325-ca270 BCE), mathematics “becomes closely
associated with the divine” for centuries afterward, enthralling its adherents with a
conviction in the cosmic connection of its “unreasonable effectiveness.” From
Archimedes (287-212 BCE) – “The perception of mathematics being the language of the
universe, and therefore the concept of God as a mathematician, was born in Archimedes’
work” – to Galileo (1564-1642) – who “showed that observational data become
meaningful descriptions of reality only when embedded in an appropriate mathematical
theory” – to Descartes (1596-1650) – whose ideas “opened the door for a systematic
mathematization of nearly everything – the very essence of the notion that God is a
mathematician … by establishing the equivalence of two perspectives of mathematics
(algebraic and geometric) previously considered disjoint” – to Newton (1642-1728) – as
Alexander Pope expressed in his couplet: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:/
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light” – a world came into view in which “the
boundary between mathematics and the sciences was blurred beyond recognition, almost
to the point of a complete fusion between mathematical insights and large swaths of
exploration.”
 “Does mathematics have an existence that is entirely independent of the human
mind?” In his book (2009), Mario Livio addresses these questions: “In other words, are
we merely discovering mathematical verities, just as astronomers discover previously
unknown galaxies? Or, is mathematics nothing but a human invention? If mathematics
indeed exists in some abstract fairyland, what is the relation between this mystical world
and physical reality? How does the human brain, with its known limitations, gain access
to such an immutable world, outside of space and time? On the other hand, if
mathematics is merely a human invention and it has no existence outside our minds, how
can we explain the fact that the invention of so many mathematical truths miraculously
anticipated questions about the cosmos and human life not even posed until many
centuries later?”
Very few scientific subjects today still make use of ideas that can be
three thousand years old…. Even though the formalism needed to prove certain
results might have changed, the mathematical results themselves do not change.
In fact, as mathematician and author Ian Stewart once put it, “There is a word in
mathematics for previous results that are later changed – they are simply called
mistakes.” And such mistakes are judged to be mistakes not because of new
findings, as in the other sciences, but because of a more careful and rigorous
reference to the same old mathematical truths. Does this indeed make
mathematics God’s native tongue?
If you think that understanding whether mathematics was invented or
discovered is not that important, consider how loaded the difference between
“invented” and “discovered” becomes in the question: Was God invented or
discovered? Or even more provocatively: Did God create humans in his own
image, or did humans invent God in their own image?

Was material reality invented or discovered? Is it any different from

mathematics? Among 21st-century mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, & cognitive
scientists there isn’t general agreement on the answers. On the one hand, French
mathematician Alain Connes, recipient of the Fields Medal (1982) & the Crafoord Prize
(2001), succinctly stated his position on the issue in 1989: “Take prime numbers, for
example, which as far as I’m concerned, constitute a more stable reality than the material
reality that surrounds us.”

The working mathematician can be likened to an explorer who sets out to

discover the world. One discovers basic facts from experience. In doing simple
calculations, for example, one realizes that the series of prime numbers seems to
go on without end. The mathematician’s job, then, is to demonstrate that there
exists an infinity of prime numbers. This is, of course, an old result due to Euclid.
One of the most interesting consequences of this proof is that if someone claims
one day to have found the greatest prime number, it will be easy to show that
he’s wrong. The same is true for any proof. We run up therefore against a reality
every bit as incontestable as physical reality.

On the other hand of the argument, linguist George Lakoff & psychologist Rafael
Núñez in their book Where Mathematics Comes From presume: “Mathematics is a
natural part of being human. It arises from our bodies, our brains, our everyday
experiences in the world.” British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, also a recipient of
the Fields Medal (1966) & the Abel Prize (2004), countered that “man has created
mathematics by idealizing and abstracting elements of the physical world”: “Any
mathematician must sympathize with Connes. We all feel that the integers, or circles,
really exist in some abstract sense and the Platonic view is extremely seductive. But can
we really defend it?”

Had the universe been one-dimensional or even discrete it is difficult to see how
geometry could have evolved. It might seem with integers we are on firmer
ground, and that counting is really a primordial notion. But let us imagine that
intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated
jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no
experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion,
temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure
continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.

The universe isn’t one-dimensional or discrete; jellyfish aren’t likely to evolve

intelligence let alone self-aware consciousness. But if we as human beings had relied
upon a base-two or binary system (as computers do) for our counting & computation,
rather than on our decimal or base-10 numeral system, we might not have any knowledge
of prime numbers. (However, Doctor Mike of mathforum.org says: “A prime is a prime
no matter which base you use to represent it.”) As for proofs, I’ll ask: To what number
can numbers eventually be reduced? The answer is four. Take any number, including
zero & one, count the number of letters & then write that number down, treating it & the
next in a similar manner in succession, until you always return to “four.” For example,
take the number “two.” It has three letters; “three” has five letters; “five” has four letters.
The proof is that other than “four” all numbers in the English language have a different
number of letters than their numerical value. (If someone were to object by saying that an
exception is “negative fifteen,” I’d point out that fifteen letters is a positive, not a
negative value.) However, in Spanish the answer would be “cinco.”
Nevertheless, had we used a binary numerical system, a decimal system & all
other bases would still exist (true as well for smart jellyfish), needing only to be
discovered by an enterprising mathematician (just as we’ve found all of those other bases
below & above ten). Further, though words & numbers as abstract concepts share some
commonalities, they aren’t the same. If as Lakoff, Núñez, & Atiyah maintain,
“mathematics is entirely a human invention, is it truly universal?” In other words, in other
worlds, if advanced intelligences exist elsewhere in the universe, have they invented
different types of mathematics from ours? If not, if we can communicate mathematically
– as Carl Sagan assumed – then mathematics is innate to the universe & must be
discovered.
“Is mathematics then some kind of language?” Livio inquires. “Insights from
mathematical logic, on one hand, and from linguistics, on the other, show that to some
extent it is.”

The works of Boole, Frege, Peano, Russell, Whitehead, Gödel, and their modern-
day followers (in particular in areas such as philosophical syntax and semantics,
and in parallel lingustics), have demonstrated that grammar and reasoning are
intimately related to an algebra of symbolic logic. But why then are there more
than 6,500 languages while there is only one mathematics? Actually, all the
different languages have many design features in common. [Very recently, using
 patterns of phonemes, Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist, has demonstrated that all
modern languages may have a single origin in southern Africa at least 50,000
years ago, with the accompanying possibility that human language emerged only
once.]

Mathematics as the language of the universe shares some characteristics with

other human languages – “certain mathematical capacities appear to be innate” such as
subitizing along with simple, limited addition & subtraction as well as very basic
geometrical concepts – it is unlike them in important ways. Children readily acquire the
ability to speak one or more languages, but fluency with mathematics appears to defeat
most people’s efforts. Can anyone provide an example of a word’s invention or an
imagined (fanciful but nonmathematical) linguistic concept that then came into existence
through discovery after the fact? For example, I can invent new English words from the
alphabet according to accepted patterns of consonants & vowels without their having any
meaning or association with anything, but no matter what number I put together from the
ten digits of the decimal system, it will always have innate meaning. Interestingly, as an
anagram you can take “Pythagorean” & rearrange the letters to form “pagan theory.”
The active aspect of mathematics being applied to solve problems at hand is
widely appreciated – from observing an apple falling, the motion of the Moon through
the night sky, & other events, Newton extracted “from all of these natural phenomena,
clear, concise, and unbelievably accurate mathematical laws of nature”; by employing
only four mathematical equations, “the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-
79) extended the framework of classical physics to include all the electric and magnetic
phenomena that were known in the 1860s”; “Einstein’s general relativity is even more
astounding” as “a perfect example of an extraordinarily precise, self-consistent
mathematical theory of something as fundamental as the structure of space and time” –
but mathematics possesses an even more impressive passive character. “The effectiveness
of mathematics may not appear to be so surprising in these cases [where mathematical
entities, relations, and equations were developed with an application already in mind],
since one could argue that the theories were tailored to fit the observations….. The
‘passive’ effectiveness refers to cases in which entirely abstract mathematical theories
had been developed, with no intended application, only to metamorphose later into
powerfully predictive physical models.”
Among the unforeseen applications, the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,
21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233,…), from which the “golden mean” can be derived – “If you
divide each number in the sequence by the one immediately preceding it (e.g., 144÷89;
233÷144;…), you find that the ratios oscillate about but come closer and closer to the
golden ratio [1.618…] the farther you go in the sequence” – along with the golden ratio
makes startling appearances throughout nature. Among those instances are the
description of the reproduction of a population of idealized honeybees, the breeding of
rabbits, the spirals of seashells, the nautilus’s development, fruit spouts of a pineapple,
the flowering of artichoke, whorls within a sunflower, the arrangement of a pine cone, the
branching of trees, “in the leaf arrangements of some plants (the phenomenon known as
phyllotaxis) and in the structure of the crystals of certain aluminum alloys.” However,
because of Euclid’s singling out the golden ratio, which attracted the attention of
mathematicians to it, Livio regards “Euclid’s definition of the concept of the golden ratio
an invention.” Notice that 2, 3, 5, 13, 89, & 233 are primes, & that 144 is the only
nontrivial Fibonacci square.
“One characteristic of mathematics that was absolutely crucial for what I dubbed
the ‘passive’ effectiveness was its essential eternal validity,” writes Livio: “Euclidean
geometry remains as correct today as it was in 300 BC. We understand now that its
axioms are not inevitable, and rather than representing absolute truths about space, they
represent truths within a particular, human-perceived universe and its associated human-
invented formalism. Nevertheless, once we comprehend the more limited context, all the
theorems hold true. In other words, branches of mathematics get to be incorporated into
larger, more comprehensive branches (e.g., Euclidean geometry is only one possible
version of geometry), but the correctness within each branch persists. It is this indefinite
longevity that has allowed scientists at any given time to search for adequate
mathematical tools in the entire arsenal of developed formalisms.”

Even the brief description I have presented so far already provides

overwhelming evidence of a universe that is either governed by mathematics, or,
at the very least, susceptible to analysis through mathematics…. much, and
perhaps all, of the human enterprise also seems to emerge from an underlying
mathematical facility, even where least expected. Examine, for instance, an
example from the world of finance – the Black-Scholes option pricing formula
(1973). The Black-Scholes model won its originators … the Nobel Memorial
Prize in economics. The key equation in the model enables the understanding of
stock option pricing (options are financial instruments that allow bidders to buy
or sell stocks at a future point in time, at agreed-upon prices). Here, however,
comes a surprising fact. At the heart of this model lies a phenomenon that had
been studied by physicists for decades – Brownian motion, the state of agitated
motion exhibited by tiny particles such as pollen suspended in water or smoke
particle in the air. Then, as if that were not enough, the same equation also
applies to the motion of hundreds of thousands of stars in star clusters. Isn’t this,
in the language of Alice in Wonderland [the author Lewis Carroll having been the
pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician & logician],
“curiouser and curiouser”? After all, whatever the cosmos may be doing,
business and finance are definitely worlds created by the human mind.

“With the recognition in the twentieth century that well-defined mathematical

designs underlie the structure of the subatomic world, modern-day physicists started [to
reverse the traditional path of discovery by beginning with a mathematical model of the
laws of nature first, followed by collecting observational & experimental facts to validate
or discard the theory]. They put the mathematical symmetry principles first, insisting that
the laws of nature and indeed the basic building blocks of matter should follow certain
patterns, and they deduced the general laws from these requirements. How does nature
know to obey these abstract mathematical symmetries?” These symmetries reflect
“immunity to changes in location, orientation, or the time you start your clock,” without
which “any hope of deciphering nature’s grand design would have been lost, since
experiments would have had to be continuously repeated in every point in space (if life
could emerge at all in such a universe).” In addition to symmetries, Livio points to
“Another feature of the cosmos that lurks in the background of mathematical theories has
become known as locality. This reflects our ability to construct the ‘big picture’ like a
jigsaw puzzle, starting with a description of the most basic interactions among
elementary particles.” Livio provides fascinating examples of serendipitous discoveries,
such as Mitch Feigenbaum’s finding in 1975 a number, after “examining the behavior of
a simple equation,” which turned out to be a universal solution predictive in experiments
of the behavior of liquid helium when heated from underneath; further his “astonishing
number showed up in the transition from the orderly flow of a fluid to turbulence, and
even the behavior of water dripping from a tap.” (An example of a universal solution can
be found if you take any four-digit number, so long as all of the digits are not the same,
arrange them into descending order & then into ascending order, & then subtract the
smaller from the large number. If you repeat this process, taking the resulting difference,
rearrange its digits into ascending & descending order & subtract again & again, you will
eventually arrive at the number 6174. Why?)
This knotty feature of “the mysterious and unexpected interplay between
mathematics and the real (physical) world” is further elucidated by Livio with an account
of knot theory – the mathematical study of knots: “Amazingly, this abstract endeavor
suddenly found extensive modern applications in topics ranging from the molecular
structure of DNA to string theory – the attempt to unify the subatomic world with
gravity.” From ellipses to Riemann geometry to group theory’s revelation of symmetries,
“The list of such ‘anticipations’ by mathematicians of the needs various disciplines of
later generations just goes on and on.”
Another remarkable quality to the “active” aspect of mathematics is its accuracy.
“[W]hy in some cases do we seem to get more accuracy out of the theory than we put into
it?” Livio inquires: “The accuracy to which Newton himself could verify his law of
gravity, given the experimental and observational results of his day, was no better than
about 4 percent. Yet the law proved to be accurate beyond all reasonable expectations. By
the 1950s the experimental accuracy was better than one ten-thousandth of a percent.”
However, Newton admittedly had been unable to explain how gravity works. More than
200 years later Albert Einstein took up the task of finding the cause. “The theory of
gravity is only one of the many examples that illustrate the miraculous suitability and
astonishing accuracy of the mathematical formulation of the laws of nature. In this case,
as in numerous others, what we got out of the equations was much more than what was
originally put in. The accuracy of both Newton’s and Einstein’s theories proved to far
exceed the accuracy of the observations that the theories attempted to explain in the first
place.”
Perhaps the best example of the astonishing accuracy that a mathematical
theory can achieve is provided by quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory
that describes all phenomena involving electrically charged particles and light. In
2006 a group of physicists at Harvard University determined the magnetic
moment of the electron (which measures how strongly the electron interacts with
a magnetic field) to a precision of eight parts in a trillion. This is an incredible
experimental feat in its own right. But when you add to that the fact that the most
recent theoretical calculations based on QED reached a similar precision and that
the two results agree, the accuracy becomes almost unbelievable. When he heard
about the continuing success o QED, one of QED’s originators, the physicist
Freeman Dyson, reacted: “I’m amazed at how precisely Nature dances to the tune
we scribbled so carelessly fifty-seven years ago, and at how the experimenters
and the theorists can measure and calculate her dance to a part in a trillion.”
 “The physicist Eugene Wigner, who coined the phrase ‘unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics,’ proposed to call all of these unexpected achievements of
mathematical theories the ‘empirical law of epistemology’ (epistemology is the discipline
that investigates the origin and limits of knowledge). If this ‘law’ were not correct, he
argued, scientists would have lacked the encouragement and reassurance that are
absolutely necessary for a thorough exploration of the laws of nature. Wigner, however,
did not offer any explanation for the empirical law of epistemology. Rather, he regarded
it as a ‘wonderful gift’ for which we should be grateful even though we do not understand
its origin. Indeed, to Wigner, this ‘gift’ captured the essence of the question about the
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”
Another advocate of this vision comes from physics Nobel laureate David J.
Gross in his 1988 paper, “Physics and mathematics at the frontier”: “a point of view that,
from my experience, is not uncommon among creative mathematicians – namely, that the
mathematical structures that they arrive at are not artificial creations of the human mind
but rather have a naturalness to them as if they were as real as the structures created by
physicists to describe the so-called real world. Mathematicians, in other words, are not
inventing new mathematics, they are discovering it. If this is the case then perhaps some
of the mysteries that we have been exploring are rendered slightly less mysterious. If
mathematics is about structures that are a real part of the natural world, as real as the
concepts of theoretical physics, then it is not so surprising that it is an effective tool in
analyzing the real world.”
There seems to be a godlike omnipresence & omniscience about mathematics; so
is it unreasonable to suppose an a priori presence of arithmetic & algebra before human
existence? Why not then before all existence? If the universe was created by pure
intelligence, & if mathematics as Bertrand Russell thought can be reduced to logic, then a
pure intelligence certainly would have been the origin of mathematics. But Russell as an
atheist denied any supernatural consciousness; he & other formalists opposed the
absolute ideas of the Platonists.

Originally, this view of the nature of mathematics (known as logicism)

had received the blessing of both those who regarded mathematics as nothing but
a human-invented, elaborate game (the formalists), and the troubled Platonists.
The former were initially happy to see a collection of seemingly unrelated
“games” coalesce into one “mother of all games.” The latter saw a ray of hope in
the idea that the whole of mathematics could have stemmed from one indubitable
source. In the Platonists’ eyes, this enhanced the probability of a single
metaphysical origin. Needless to say, a single root of mathematics could have
also helped, in principle at least, to identify the cause for its powers.

Following the 19th-century “non-Euclidean heresies” crisis of the “invention” of

geometries with different axioms from Euclid’s (e.g., Riemann’s curved spaces in three,
four, & more dimensions, which became crucial for Einstein’s theory of spacetime),
thereby firming the bridge between algebra & geometry of Descartes’s initiative, arose an
understanding establishing “the complete independence of the axiom of choice and the
continuum hypothesis,” derived from Georg Cantor’s set theory, that “the axiom of
choice can neither be proved nor refuted from the other axioms of set theory” as well as
that “the continuum hypothesis can neither be proved nor refuted from the same
collection of axioms, even if one includes the axiom of choice.” Livio summarizes the
dire situation: “The fundamental role of set theory as the potential basis for the whole of
mathematics made the problem for the Platonists much more acute. If indeed one could
formulate many set theories simply by choosing a different collection of axioms, didn’t
this argue for mathematics being nothing but human intuition?”
The German mathematician David Hilbert, a formalist, was willing to sacrifice
meaning to secure a solid foundation for mathematics by means of creating a
metamathematics, though Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), arguably the greatest
philosopher of the 20th century, “regarded Hilbert’s efforts with mathematics a waste of
time…. Wittgenstein did not believe that the understanding of one ‘game’ could depend
on the construction of another.” Then in 1931: “With one blow, the twenty-four-year-old
Kurt Gödel would drive a stake right through the heart of formalism.” His incompleteness
theorems sent shock & awe throughout the worlds of mathematics & philosophy:

1. Any consistent formal system S within which a certain amount of elementary

arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete with regard to statements of
elementary arithmetic: there are such statements which can neither be proved
nor disproved in S.
2. For any consistent formal system S within which a certain amount of
elementary arithmetic can be carried out, the consistency of S cannot be
proved in S itself.

… Put somewhat simplistically, the incompleteness theorems proved that

Hilbert’s formalist program was essentially doomed from the start. Gödel showed
that any formal system that is powerful enough to be of any interest is inherently
either incomplete or inconsistent. That is, in the best case, there will always be
assertions that the formal system can neither prove nor disprove. In the worst, the
system would yield contradictions. Since it is always the case that for any
statement T, either T or not-T has to be true, the fact that a finite formal system
can neither prove nor disprove certain assertions means that true statements will
always exist that are not provable within the system. In other words, Gödel
demonstrated that no formal system composed of a finite set of axioms and rules
of inference can ever capture the entire body of truths of mathematics. The most
one can hope for is that the commonly accepted axiomatization are only
incomplete and not inconsistent.
Gödel himself believed that an independent, Platonic notion of
mathematical truth did exist. In an article published in 1947 he wrote:

But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have

something like a perception also of the objects of set theory, as is seen
from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I
don’t see any reason why we should have any less confidence in this
kind of perception, i.e. in mathematical intuition, than in sense
perception.”

“Contrary to some popular misconceptions, Gödel incompleteness theorems do not

imply that some truths will never become known,” Livio cautions: “We also cannot infer from the
theorems that the human capacity for understanding is somehow limited.”
 What this meant, however, was that the puzzle of “unreasonable
effectiveness” of mathematics became even thornier…. Imagine what would
have happened had the logicist endeavor been entirely successful. This would
have implied that mathematics stems fully from logic – literally from the laws of
thought. But how could such a deductive science so marvelously fit natural
phenomena? What is the relation between formal logic (maybe we should even
say human formal logic) and the cosmos? The answer did not become any clearer
after Hilbert and Gödel. Now all that existed was an incomplete formal “game,”
expressed in mathematical language. How could models based on such an
“unreliable” system produce deep insights about the universe and its workings?

Livio presents yet another viewpoint: “With small variations in emphasis,

essentially all of the neuropsychologists and biologists determine that mathematics is a
human invention. Upon closer examination, however, you find that while the
interpretation of the cognitive data is far from being unambiguous, there is no question
that the cognitive efforts represent a new and innovative phase in the search for the
foundation of mathematics.” Mathematics has a generative character, like life, having the
capacity of giving birth to other objects. In a dialogue with Alain Connes, French
neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux states in Conservations on Mind, Matter, &
Mathematics: “In certain respects these new mathematical objects are like living beings:
like living beings they’re physical objects susceptible to very rapid evolution; unlike
living beings, with the particular exception of viruses, they evolve in our brain.”
“Some empirical discoveries surely preceded the formulation of concepts, but the
concepts themselves undoubtedly provided an incentive for more theorems to be
discovered,” writes Livio. In a somewhat related manner, religions originated with
someone having a new conception of existence, which disciples & followers edited &
embellished, organizing the cult into an institution over the years after the founder’s
demise but without ever again touching base with the initial moment of divine
inspiration. No matter how skillfully the founder of a faith attempts to communicate
his/her glimpse of God to others, the communication will be dependent on metaphors,
which at best approximate the actual experience. Mathematical metaphors, such as
equations & formulae, are more precise with their knowledgeable audiences than words
can ever hope to express. British philosopher Sir Michael Dummett noted that “the
meaning of a mathematical statement determines and is exhaustively determined by its
use” for “an individual cannot communicate what he cannot be observed to communicate:
if an individual associated with a mathematical symbol or formula some mental content,
where the association did not lie in the use he made of the symbol or formula, then he
could not convey that content by means of the symbol or formula, for his audience would
be unaware of the association and would have no means of becoming aware of it.” Unlike
mathematics with its incredible accuracy & predictive power (via probability) in the
universe, religions, because they primarily deal with the hereafter, fail to provide us with
unambiguous answers or divination for our wagers from doctrine applicable to our
individual lives. When you board an airplane, you have far greater faith in the physics &
engineering that the flight will get you to your destination than you have that death will
deliver you to heaven.
Livio eventually tips his hand near the end of the book: “‘Is mathematics created
or discovered?’ is the wrong question to ask because it implies that the answer has to be
one or the other and that the two possibilities are mutually exclusive. Instead, I suggest
that mathematics is partly created and partly discovered.”

Humans commonly invent mathematical concepts and discover the

relations among those concepts. Some empirical discoveries surely preceded the
formulation of concepts, but the concepts themselves undoubtedly provided an
incentive for more theorems to be discovered. I should also note that some
philosophers of mathematics, such as the American Hilary Putnam, adopt an
intermediate position known as realism – they believe in the objectivity of
mathematical discourse (that is, sentences are true or false, and what makes them
true or false is external to humans) without committing themselves, like the
Platonists, to the existence of “mathematical objects.”

He then cites the contribution from Sir Michael Atiyah again, “whose views on the nature
of mathematics I have largely adopted.”

If one views the brain in its evolutionary context then the mysterious
success of mathematics in the physical sciences is at least partly explained. The
brain evolved in order to deal with the physical world, so it should not be too
surprising that it has developed a language, mathematics, that is well suited for
the purpose.

Livio continues: “This line of reasoning is very similar to the solutions proposed by the
cognitive scientists. Atiyah also recognizes, however, that this explanation hardly
addresses the thornier parts of the problem – how does mathematics explain the more
esoteric aspects of the physical world. In particular, this explanation leaves the question
of what I called the “passive” effectiveness (mathematical concepts finding applications
long after their invention) entirely open. Atiyah notes: ‘The skeptic can point out that the
struggle for survival only requires us to cope with physical phenomena at the human
scale, yet mathematical theory appears to deal successfully with all scales from the
atomic to the galactic.’ To which his only suggestion is: ‘Perhaps the explanation lies in
the abstract hierarchical nature of mathematics which enables us to move up and down
the world scale with comparative ease.’”
Following up on computer scientist Richard Hamming’s suggested solution,
which Livio says for years he had accepted as a full explanation of Wigner’s enigma,
“that humans select, and continuously improve mathematics, to fit a given situation … an
‘evolution and natural selection’ of mathematical ideas” – in his book Dreams of a Final
Theory, Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg proposes a similar interpretation.
“There is no doubt that such selection and evolution indeed occur,” Livio concurs: “After
sifting through a variety of mathematical formalisms and tools, scientists retian those that
work, and they do not hesitate to upgrade them or change them as better ones become
available. But even if we accept this idea, why are there mathematical theories that can
explain the universe at all?” Further, Livio emphasizes the nontrivial fact that “there is a
sufficiently large number of phenomena that mathematics does elucidate to warrant an
explanation. Moreover, the range of facts and processes that can be interpreted by
mathematics continually widens.”
Even Hamming after offering four explanations for the conundrum in 1980 – the
last of which comes close to Atiyah’s by stating, “Darwin’s evolution would naturally
select for survival those competing forms of life which had the best models of reality in
their minds” – conceded that: “if you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally,
then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we
are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that
evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics.” At the conclusion of his article, Hamming makes the admission,
concerning his hoped for solution to Wigner’s riddle: “all of the explanations I have
given when added together simply are not enough to explain what I set out to account
for.”
So what is it we’ve discovered or invented? Mathematics, God, the universe
itself? Livio asks: “What is it that guarantees that a mathematical theory should exist at
all? In other words, why is there, for instance, a theory of general relativity? Could it not
be that there is no mathematical theory of gravity?”

The answer is actually simpler than you might think. There are indeed no
guarantees! There exists a multitude of phenomena for which no precise
predictions are possible, even in principle. This category includes, for example, a
variety of dynamic systems that develop chaos, where the tiniest change in the
initial conditions may produce entirely different end results. Phenomena that may
exhibit such behavior include the stock market, the weather pattern above the
Rocky Mountains, a ball bouncing in a roulette wheel, the smoke rising from a
cigarette, and indeed the orbits of the planets in the solar system. This is not to
say that mathematicians have not developed ingenious formalisms that can
address some important aspects of these problems, but no deterministic
predictive theory exists. The entire fields of probability and statistics have been
created precisely to tackle those areas in which one does not have a theory that
yields much more than what has been put in. Similarly, a concept dubbed
computational complexity delineates limits to our ability to solve problems by
practical algorithms, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems mark certain
limitations of mathematics even within itself.