An excerpt from the book “
Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality" by Ben Orlin
"On a fundamental level, mathematicians do not care about reality. I’m not talking about the odd habits of mathematicians - muttering to themselves, wearing the same trousers for weeks, forgetting their spouse’s names on occasion. I’m talking about their work. Despite the aggressive ad campaign about its “real-world usefulness,” mathematics is pretty indifferent to the physical universe. What math cares about are not things but ideas. Math posits rules and then unpacks their implications by careful reasoning. Who cares if the resulting conclusions - about infinitely long cones and 42-dimensional sausages - don’t resemble physical reality? What matters is their abstract truth. Math lives not in the material universe of science but in the conceptual universe of logic. Mathematicians call this work “creative.” They liken it to art. That makes science their muse.
Think of a composer who hears chirping birds and weaves the melody into her next work. Or a painter who gazes at cumulus clouds drifting through an afternoon sky, and models her next landscape on that image. These artists don’t care if they’ve captured their subjects with photorealistic fidelity. For them, reality is nothing more or less than a fertile source of inspiration. That’s how math sees the world, too. Reality is a lovely starting point, but the coolest destinations lie far beyond it. Math sees itself as a dreamy poet. Science sees it as a supplier of specialized technical equipment. And herein we find one of the great paradoxes of human inquiry: These two views, both valid, are hard to reconcile. If math is an equipment supplier, why is its equipment so strangely poetic? And if math is a poet, then why is its poetry so unexpectedly useful?"
