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Is Math Invented, or Discovered?
I walked into a Standard Mathematics Room, where I met Ms.Kate, from Alaska. She is a new teacher, very inspirational actually. At the very first days of her classes, she said she will be assigning us an assignment soon that will be short, either research-supported, or not, paragraphs. Some days afterwards she did assign us.
What do you think about Math? I want to share this to you as well. First we need to answer what is invented. "Invented" is man-made, anthropogenic thing that hadn't been existed before the rise of mankind. "Discovered" is something that existed long ago before human, or start to appear naturally, and a human just first saw it before anyone in history, and said, "I discovered".
Math is very broad. If you study upper-level maths, you will now know that math is all related, and the more complicated field of math that has to do more with reality is Physics. Laws of Physics exist obviously before humans. If we take a close look, we can see, no matter how we look at this, gravity, one of the things stated by maths, and physics appeared before humankind. Things fall, as they attract each other together. Earth attract water to its surface, and this powerful force of the laws of physics holds the earth together before we existed. Well, well but does that mean math is discovered?
Here, let's think about this. I have been wondering, since when I was a kid, "Why do we have to count one-to-ten before start counting another figure like eleven, and twelve, before it is ten time more than its previous figure, or in a simpler explanations, when that new figure reached ten, like 99, then we need to add another figure, and it will become 100, and so on. This way of counting is called decimal number, as deci- prefix means "ten", like decades meaning a course of ten years, decimal numbers is a ten-based numbers that when we reach ten. We start a new figure, either adding more zero, expanding its value, or putting more zero behind the dots, making the number shrink. Why don't we have twelve-figure base, for example, 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,æ,ß, then 10. We can do that but we don't because humans has ten finger. For me, the way we count the math is invented but the ways maths work were discovered, and existed before humankind. The laws of physics will be very different if we have number of different base.
What do you think?
Comment
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K-Mod Comment by Gumbo123 on August 17, 2015 at 2:40am -
BINARY COUNTING:
It also takes a lot longer to count because of how you actually say the numbers
How fast can nearly anyone you know over the age of 5 years old count to TEN?
Say it out loud: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten
Now try it in binary:
1 = one
10 = one zero
11 = one one
100 = one zero zero
101 = one zero one
110 = one one zero
111 = one one one
1000 = one zero zero zero
1001 = one zero zero one
1010 = one zero one zero
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K-Mod Comment by Gumbo123 on August 17, 2015 at 2:30am -
Ten fingers on two hands, the possible starting point of the decimal counting.While the decimal system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal ) based on 10 digits is the most common used, it's not the only in even current usage. Nearly all modern computers language is based a BINARY numeral system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number ), which would be recognize only 2 "real" numbers (0 and 1). That makes it fairly quick to count to ONE MILLION on the binary scale, right?
1
10
11
100
101
110
111
1000
1001
1010
1011
1100
1101
1110
1111
10000
10001
10010
10011
10100
10101
10110
10111
11000
11001
11010
11011
11100
11101
11110
11111
100000
100001
100010
100100
100101
100110
100111
101000
101001
101010
101011
101100
101101
101010
101100
101110
101111
110000
110001
110010
110011
110100
110101
110110
110111
111000
111001
111010
111011
111100
111101
111110
111111
1000000
Except, it's not really one thousand, is it? You've still only counted SIXTY-FIVE (65) items . . . the count number 65 (as we commonly know it) only looks like 1,000,000 (note, binary doesn't use the comma) because you only have two didgits to work with. It still takes one million ticks to count to one million.
Think about the old riddle, "Which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?" They both weigh one pound, but the feathers take up much more space than the lead.
Same here! the number ONE MILLION expressed in a binary number system would take you much longer to express, being illustrated as . . .
11110100001001000000_2
Other numbering systems?
Cardinal one million Ordinal 1000000th (one millionth) Factorization 26× 56 Roman numeral M Binary 111101000010010000002 Ternary 12122102020013 Quaternary 33100210004 Quinary 2240000005 Senary 332333446 Octal 36411008 Duodecimal 40285412 Hexadecimal F424016 Vigesimal 6500020 Base 36 LFLS36
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