Platonism vs. Formalism

[jar546]

Isn't math just like building codes—something we made up to organize the chaos? There's no 'universal truth' to it, just human constructs to solve specific problems. Why should we treat it as anything more?

 

[Yankee Chronicler]

BURN THE HERETIC!




Says the guy who was a college math & physics major when my younger sister's elementary school introduce Cuisenaire rods as a system to [allegedly] make it easier for kids to learn arithmetic. I happened to be home the night they put on a dog and pony show for the parents, to explain just how wonderfully aweson this new system was. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. The problem was that the school adopted it without teaching the teachers how to teach it. There was literally nobody in our entire school system who could actually show why or how these pick-up sticks were supposed to be better at teaching kids to deal with numbers.

I don't think mathematics was (were?) developed to organize chaos. I don't think geometry, for example, is chaos. What's chaotic about a perfect square, a circle, or an equilateral triangle? But mathematics helps us understand these shapes, and many others. You don't think there's universal truth behind the formulae for calculating the areas of geometric shapes, or for finding the diagonal of a square?

 

[Yikes]

I've heard that little kids and also isolated tribes that have not been exposed to formal mathematics tend to think in terms of doubling. The human mind naturally starts with one, goes to two, then after that comes four, then eight.
Counting in units of one is both a major abstraction and a leap in mathematical skill.

 

[Inspector Gadget]

The question here is whether a building code violation exists prior to our observation of same, and more appropriately, whether we, by the act of perceiving the building code violation and deeming it as such, cause the violation to come into its primal form.

 

[Wstubbs]

The question here is whether a building code violation exists prior to our observation of same, and more appropriately, whether we, by the act of perceiving the building code violation and deeming it as such, cause the violation to come into its primal form.

Ah Schoedinger's inspection

 

[Yikes]

Wait, is the focus of the question on math, or on building codes?

 

[Yikes]

Now you've got me watching YouTube on Platonism vs. Formalism in math:

 

[rktect 1]

I'm hoping that you don't actually believe that nonsense

 

[Yikes]

I'm hoping that you don't actually believe that nonsense

Hey, George Washington was a formalist:

 

[jar546]

Some argue that math is the 'language of the universe,' especially in physics. But if that’s true, why do we keep inventing new kinds of math to solve unsolvable problems? Isn’t that just proof that math evolves with us, rather than being a universal truth?