“Mathematics
is the only truly universal language”
Carl Sagan, Contact
Is this true? This section explores
the belief that mathematics is the language of the cosmos.
Many science fiction writers love
to use mathematics as a language to talk to aliens.It
is very likely that aliens would recognize prime numbers
if we were to beat them out on a drum. Of course the
actual pictures we have devised to depict numbers would
be unintelligible to them. They are unintelligible to
many cultures on earth. For example, on the right are
some prime numbers written in other scripts: can you
guess the prime?
The point about mathematics as
a universal language is that despite the notation used,
there is an underlying pattern that crosses cultures
and language .But there is much debate about how truly
universal mathematics is. Could an alien culture appreciate
a complicated proof like the proof of Fermat’s
Last Theorem. Or is this so culturally specific that
it depends on our cultural context? Listen to the neurobiologist
Jean-Pierre Changeux who argues that mathematics is
not a universal concept but a product of the human mind
and therefore can be used to understand how the brain
functions:
“Mathematics is taught in
school as a coherent set of propositions, theorems,
axioms. One forgets that these have appeared successively
in the course of the history of mathematics and of human
society – in short, that they are cultural objects
subject to evolution”.
On the other hand for mathematician
Alain Connes ‘prime numbers…constitute a
more stable reality than the material reality that surrounds
us’. Join the debate about how universal is maths.
[reference: Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes “Conversations
on Mind, Matter and Mathematics. Princeton University
Press.
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