by Charles Peterson

Created on: July 14, 2009   Last Updated: July 19, 2009

Some mathematicians offer the explanation that mathematics is a science because it uses the scientific method. They try with renewed attempts, incorporating what they know, to invent new ways to uncover the secrets of nature. This may be true enough on the surface, but it is not what actually goes on.

Mathematics is considered a science because it is a branch of knowledge. When did this knowledge begin? When humans learned how to count. Even that was a struggle. There is a difference between a cardinal and an ordinal number. You may want five pairs of socks to take with you when you travel. It doesn't matter which ones you will wear first. But when you take them out of the drawer you usually count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Although counting 3, 5, 2, 1, 4 would be just as good in order to know you have five pairs of socks in your luggage.

The Greeks invented geometry. We can do marvelous things with geometry. We can sight with our thumb up along the length of our arm and know the height of a pine tree that we know is three hundred yards distant. We can calculate how much tiling will cover the area of a floor in a room by measuring the length of its sides. The Greeks studied conic curves out of curiosity. But we find uses for this once abstract knowledge as time goes on. An ellipse tells us the location of a planet in orbit which has the sun at one of its two focal points. Some people need this precise knowledge. Other people just think of the sun as being at the center of a circle. Parabolas and hyperbolas are conics that have their uses too.

Arab traders got us to thinking about algebra. Since the traveling merchants have to intensely calculate their what ifs before a journey would begin they needed algebraic equations in order to solve for their unknown quantities. They developed rules for solving equations such as: like terms combine with like terms, and what you do to one side of an equation you do to the other side. Perhaps they were a little too motivated by the life struggle back in those days. But these are the rules we still remember in mathematics.

Mathematics is considered to be a science because it is an orderly extension of a branch of knowledge. However if you are actually a mathematician creating new theory you also function as an artist. An artist is more contemporaneous. It takes wile and craft and cunning to use your personality to invent something that will enter the branch of knowledge. It is not merely advancing by placing

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