Hello SEN. At my lunch table today I had an internal conflict after listening to one of the guys at my table. I love mathematics and I don't want to reason with a bias, so help me out here.

He said,"Mathematics is a language, and languages are man made. Mathematics is not real and it is something that we simply made up."

I agree that it is a language, and that languages are man made. However, going the distance of saying that it is not real is something else. I will admit that it is arbitrary and abstract when it is not relative to life, but how can physics be described by mathematics if they are not real. Does mathematics interpret physics, or are the mathematics behind physics the laws themselves? This is important to me, because I would like math to hold objective value above that of opinion.

I'd say math isn't man-made, but the methods in which we perform calculation is...
Like the operations ... Those are man made, simply there to make understanding simpler.

I agree it is a language because we have to create notations (which are man made) to describe the math relationships. However Math is rationally and empirically true because we can apply it to real life things like physics and many other fields of science. But the concept of math itself is not man made only the notations that simplify the understanding of math.

Math is as fundamentally real as anything else we observe. Beyond that, you're going to stray into epistemology and the question of what defines real, which is a little farther than I really want to consider.

Maths are real. It's like the Super-Science, the God-Science.

... though you must be aware the very basics of mathematics are themselves based on axioms. ;o

I couldn't express it better than you.
That's exactly my opinion.

The solution to this problem lies within here wouldn't it? It sounds like he is using two definitions for "made up". It sounds like he used "imagined" and "created" in "made up".

The argument whether math is man-made or not is a very old one. I think it is natural and we are simply uncovering it. The more I study math the more I am intrigued by how previous findings are in harmony with the newer ones.

Things happen in the universe whether we understand it or not. Maths is just a man-made creation for understanding what is happening.

arguing over math??

quote from wikipedia ( ) : Mathematical realism, like realism in general, holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. In this point of view, there is really one sort of mathematics that can be discovered: Triangles, for example, are real entities, not the creations of the human mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics

aka it's something we made up. It's purely abstract.

another link http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=237609

5mins ty google

Why are you considering that man-made objects are not real in the first place? lol

All important, objective math, would be independently discovered by any intelligent life eventually. They'd have different notations, and symbols, and names for theorems, but the work would all be fully translatable.

Have you ever watched the movie "Contact"? My belief is based off of that; that mathematics is a universal language.

Just to be a devil's advocate, math is both wrong and un-empirical, and therefore must be man-made. I'll give you an example: 4 birds are sitting on a telephone wire. I whip out mah :hurr:lazar and vaporize one, and the rest are unharmed. How many birds are left?

Math (and probably half of SEN) says that 4 - 1 = 3, so 3 are left and any more/less is insane.
Common sense says that the other birds probably noticed their buddy get lazared, or at least saw the light, and flew off. 0 are left.

Alright, that was a joke, but since I can prove 1 = .999..., then all mathematics is, or can be proven, incorrect. At least marginally.

1=1
9/9 = 1
8/9 + 1/9 = 9/9 = 1
8/9 = .888...
1/9 = .111...
.888... + .111... = .999...
8/9 + 1/9 = .888... + .111...
Therefore, .999 = 1.

8/9 is not the same as .888...
.888... is a numerical representation of 8/9, but the ... implies that it will never exactly equal 8/9
So you didn't prove anything.

You are jumping to an equally untrue conclusion both when you say 8/9 = .888... and when you say .999 = 1. So really, the work done wasn't even necessary.
It should also read .999... = 1 according to your work. not .999 = 1

Yes, he should have put .999... = 1. But in any event, he is correct:

"In mathematics, the repeating decimal 0.999… which may also be written as 0.\bar{9}, 0.\dot{9} or 0.(9)\,\!, denotes a real number that can be shown to be the number one. In other words, the notations 0.999… and 1 represent the same number. Proofs of this equality have been formulated with varying degrees of mathematical rigour, taking into account preferred development of the real numbers, background assumptions, historical context, and target audience."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...

It's not incorrect. Not by a slightest margin. If it were incorrect by a slightest margin, it wouldn't be math. Closing my eyes on that, even your own argument is illogical. You want to prove that .(9) = 1 and you're claiming that that's wrong. By the same analogy, claiming that 1/3 = .(3) is also wrong, yet you use similar fractions for your proof. In other words, you're using something you claim to be wrong to prove your own point.

And, as stated before, .(9) and 1 are just notations used to represent the same thing. If you find that hard to accept, it's like the infinite sum of 1/n! and e; they don't look the same, but they have the same meaning.

I thought I edited the .999 to read as .999..., but i guess I forgot to hit "post" or something.

Besides, my math teacher and I always seem to get different results from the same problems, so math is wrong.

I don't care what wikipedia says. .999... could equal 1 if infinite was attainable. But it's not. It can represent it all it wants, but in real life application- it'll never equal 1.
Even in the theoretical state, it'll always be off by 0.00000...(insert infinite zeros here)...0001

If you're arguing against math, you're wrong. Read about limits.