This viral makeup TikTok raises fair questions about whether math is real | Mathematics - TNW

This article is republished from The Conversation by Daniel Mansfield, Lecturer in Mathematics, UNSW under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

---

While filming herself getting ready for work recently, TikTok user @gracie.ham reached deep into the ancient foundations of mathematics and found an absolute gem of a question:
How could someone come up with a concept like algebra? by The Conversation.
 

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

She also asked what the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras might have used mathematics for, and other questions that revolve around the age-old conundrum of whether mathematics is “real” or something humans just made up.

Many responded negatively to the post, but others — including mathematicians like me — found the questions quite insightful.

Is mathematics real? Philosophers and mathematicians have been arguing over this for centuries. Some believe mathematics is universal; others consider it only as real as anything else humans have invented...

Babylonian algebra
Buried in the deserts of modern Iraq, clay tablets from ancient Babylon have survived intact for about 4,000 years.

These tablets are slowly being translated and what we have learned so far is that the Babylonians were practical people who were highly numerate and knew how to solve sophisticated problems with numbers.

Their arithmetic was different from ours, though. They didn’t use zero or negative numbers. They even mapped out the motion of the planets without using calculus as we do...

Mathematics has been happening for a very, very long time. Long before ancient Greece and Pythagoras.
Read more...

Source: TNW