I know someone who claimed that life without mathematics would be like the “2001, a space odyssey” apes, before the monolith appeared to them – both Clarke’s novel and Kubrick’s film are valid here. The purpose of this section will be to show that this sentence is not exaggerated and perhaps even falls short. We also intend to claim for mathematics part of the recognition and fame that is often attributed exclusively to physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, technology or medicine, for discoveries and advances that, in not a few cases, are due both to the first of the sciences -mathematics- and to those that came after it. I know that this sounds like an obsession, the “I want you to come and live with me, die with me, do everything with me” that Humbert Humbert said to Lolita – to quote from another Kubrick film, or from Nabokov’s novel – what can I say! In any case, we are not the only ones obsessed, since the prince of wit already made his Don Quixote say that even knights-errant: “must know mathematics, because at every step they will be required to do so”.
On the universality of mathematics
As we commented in the post The Triumph of Reason: Newton’s Programme, after the appearance of Newton’s Principia many of the great scientists set out to study natural phenomena armed with the physical principles described […]
