Concept
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Overview
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" was the title of the 1959 Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences, delivered at New York University by the physicist Eugene Wigner, and published in Communication in Pure and Applied Mathematics in 1960. In it, Wigner observes that pure mathematical concepts that have been developed and studied independently of physics, often so mathematicians can show their “ingenuity and sense of formal beauty”, nevertheless often find applications in physics. The mathematical structure of theoretical physics often points the way to further advances in that theory and has empirical predictive power in describing nature. Albert Einstein and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had previously thought that the success of abstract mathematics in physical science was a mystery that required explanation, but Wigner's lecture became the classic statement of the problem.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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Call it {alpha}. There will be one moment of the temporal series of {alpha} which covers the given event-particle. Thus the position of the event-particle in the temporal series {alpha} is defined by this moment, which we will call M. The position of the particle in the space of M is then fixed in the ordinary way by three levels which intersect in it and in it only. This procedure of fixing the position of an…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
States what The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences is; the author is tied to The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences in the knowledge graph.
Both of them, however, admirable as their work is, seem to me to suffer from a general philosophical bias. Poincare is Kantian, while Mach is ultra-empiricist; with Poincare almost all the mathematical part of physics is merely conventional, while with Mach the sensation as a mental event is identified with its object as a part of the physical world. Nevertheless, both these authors, and especially Mach, deserve…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
States what The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences is.
By comparison with language, we can now see what is the function in thought which is performed by pure mathematics. It is a resolute attempt to go the whole way in the direction of complete analysis, so as to separate the elements of mere matter of fact from the purely abstract conditions which they exemplify. The habit of such analysis enlightens every act of the functioning of the human mind. It first (by…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
The author is tied to The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Related ideas
- Eugene Wigner
- Isaac Newton
- Gravitational field
- Max Tegmark
- Mathematics
- Theoretical physics
- Maxwell's equations
- Ivor Grattan-Guinness
- Aesthetics
- Political philosophy
- Physicist
- Newton's law of universal gravitation
- Quantum mechanics
- Quantum field theory
- Special relativity
- Spacetime
- James Clerk Maxwell
- Galileo Galilei
- Empirical evidence
- Uncertainty principle
- Value theory
- Werner Heisenberg
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Thought experiment
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.