math – Christopher Wink

We should enjoy math like we do music: as patterns and poetry with logic to understand our world and ourselves.

“Mathematics is a way to coerce the chaos into sense.” So writes mathematician Sarah Hart in her 2023 book Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.

Her book is a charming collection of how mathematics is used and appears in great writing — and bad writing too. The book has three sections: numbers as structure; numbers as metaphor and phrases and numbers as character. I enjoyed it, and recommend it for writers, readers and those interested in how the world works.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Golden Ratio, the 2003 historical analysis of the irrational number phi (~1.62) by Mario Livio, reads more like a top level review of a few thousand years of mathematical history. And so, while I enjoyed the pursuit of phi in art throughout time, I was much more taken by the top-level review of the development of math. The development, or, well, the discovery of math.

Indeed, of the various historical storylines, one theme from the book that stuck out for me more than others, I was most taken bythe ongoing debate about whether math was invented or discovered, the former of which is my persuasion to date:

Continue reading The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio: were mathematics invented or discovered?