Numbers

I was recently having a debate about numbers and math. I was arguing that numbers were discovered, like gravity, rather than invented, like units of measurement. The counter argument was that if humans weren’t around to think about numbers, they wouldn’t exist.

This goes back to the old riddle about the tree falling in the forest. If intelligent minds didn’t exist to think about numbers, would the concepts of numbers and quantities exist? Not the names of the numbers- “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. Would two holes in the ground still be two holes in the ground, or would the idea of “two” be totally irrelevant?

I am completely mystified by numbers and mathematics. They are the one thing that is totally true and absolute in this universe (besides change, death, and taxes), no matter who is thinking about it. Aliens from another galaxy on the other side of the universe still think that if you take four things and split them into two even groups, you will have two things in each group. 2 + 2 will always equal 4. 3 + 9 will always equal 12. Human thinkers, long ago, didn’t sit down and decide this, the discovered it. It was realized.

As an anology, think about music. Music wasn’t invented. To invent something, one has to create something that didn’t exist before. Ben Franklin didn’t invent electricity, he discovered it. When people first realized that certain sounds are pleasing when played in sequence, they discovered what we today call music. They then went on to invent different instruments that created different sounds in different ways, which could be manipulated to produce the desired sound of the user.  But even if they weren’t there to discover it, those sounds would still sound the same way.

In the same way, our great-great-grandthinkers did the same thing with mathematics. They figured out that two oranges and two oranges are four oranges, or that four oranges are also two oranges and two oranges. Even the lowest forms of life can still understand that 3 units of food are more than 2 units of food. They may not understand what 3 or 2 is, but they still tap into that idea. It’s universal.

I find mathematics beautiful because they are so unchanging. When you sit down and play with them, be it with blocks, abacus, pencil, or calculator, you are tapping into a great force in the universe, something so far above and beyond yourself that it makes you feel so incredibly insignificant, yet immensely powerful.

In other news, we all might cease existing on Friday. Numbers still will, though.