Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The Beauty of Mathematics

Australian Geneticist Michael Denton talks about the strange beauty of mathematics and how that beauty militates against the hypothesis that mathematics is something that we invent. Denton argues instead that mathematical truth exists independently of us and that we discover rather than create it. This raises, of course, the intriguing question of how it came to be in the first place:
An explanation of Pascal's Triangle can be found here. While you're at it you might also want to check out the Fibonacci sequence and its myriad occurrences in nature. It's fascinating.