Mathematics Lies Outside Ourselves

I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are simply the notes of our observations. * * * Let us suppose that I am giving a lecture on some system of geometry, such as the ordinary Euclidean geometry, and that I draw figures on the blackboard to stimulate the imagination of my audience, rough drawings of straight lines or ...

 Empirical Reality is All Probability in Mathematics

The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.

 Why Does the Universe Exist?

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

 Francis Bacon on Mathematics

In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand this excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to put itself into all postur...

 L Peter Deutsch: Computer Science is Not Science

I have a little bit of a rant about computer science also. I could make a pretty strong case that the word science should not be applied to computing. I think essentially all of what's called computer science is some combination of engineering and applied mathematics. I think very little of it is science in terms oft of the scientific process, is, where what you're doing is developing better descriptions of observed phenomena.