preview

Why Is Mathematics Invented By Humans?

Good Essays

With mathematics seemingly being intuitive and the basis of the universe around us it would seem a given that mathematics has always been there, that it is a physical concept which we can completely understand and one that has set rules that cannot change. However this is not the case and we only have to look just over two thousand years into the past to see the use of Roman Numerals, where numbers were represented by letters or four thousand years in the past to see the unrealistic yet beautiful base-60 number system used by the Babylonians to realise that whilst the overall concept is the same, to group things of the same amount together, the way that we express it is vastly different.
To address the question, “To what extent was mathematics invented by humans?” we first need to deal with the most simple concept of mathematics, the natural numbers; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.. There is nothing simpler in maths then this, but it took us nearly 165,000 years to even produce a primitive tally stick, the Lebombo bone. Yet it was these numbers more than anything that enabled us to take control of the world around us and let our presence be felt across the globe. But what is a number? It appears to be a fairly easy question yet it is very hard to answer as it is not shown in the physical world, it is an abstraction, a human mental concept, one that is derived from reality but is not actually real, but one which allowed humans to develop and discover new areas of mathematics and

Get Access