I think it's overcomplicating things. Math is the study of patterns, trying to come up with rules that govern them. Those patterns might originate in the physical world or in our minds. Asking whether math is real or not is like asking "is linguistics real?" Linguistics, per se, is just the study of patterns of human language. It might, however, come up with made-up patterns (e.g., Esperanto).

Mathematics describes perfectly that happend in the past 13,8 billion years, and also everything that will happen in the next 137 quintillion years.

I can´t see why would anybody question if it is real.

A better title is, does math exist outside of our minds.

I doubt the universe cares about numbers.

Indeed, this should be the title. Not clickbait enough, tho.

At that point, a more salient question would be whether anything at all exists outside our minds.

We don't actually know that. Science (especially physics) assumes that the universe can in principle be explained, but there's not actually a way to prove this without assuming some explainable is possible (see: problem of induction). More concretely, we know our current theories and maths can't fully explain our observations, though they are very close.

I just want to add on to the article a bit.

I'm a mathematical realist. I call myself a Platonist. I've done some analytics philosophy, number theory, and model theory, but I'm not a mathematician.

The history of math is tied with the history of Platonism. The article mentions it going back to Plato, but I think Plato was influenced by Pythagoras in terms of Math.

Skipping a lot of history, we know that Hilbert posed his problems. Then mathematicians decided they wanted to "reduce math down to logic." The names Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Godel, Church, and Turing should ring a bell. Until WW2 logical positivism was a thing.

Talking about "math" in terms of symbols, or what we use as humans kind of misses the point. Sure historical Platonism focused more on the theory of forms, Justice, Beauty, Art, and all that. But it's more so about "logic" or rather "systems." The question is about how this system comes into our reality. A Realist would say something like "systems can't be self describing (in the natural world)." I'm not entirely happy with that statement, but I think it's a starting point.

If one wants a quick fun introduction to Mathematical Realism and logic, I really enjoyed "Logicomix." Or spend some time on `plato.stanford.edu`[0]. I can't recall the paper but Russell poses Platonism pretty well. I read [1] Abraham Robinson for a presentation on this topic in a Model Theory seminar.

This is a large topic, with a large history, and it's important enough that we keep talking about it. I realize that many don't care, but personally I find it interesting and math is more fun with it.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Robinson

This article is weird like some blogspam. If it were serious it would at least mention a modern version of that philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

Math is the map. The map is not the territory, yet incredibly useful.

This is such a shallow unsatisfying article. It’s entire content is basically “math seems to be real… BUT IS IT??” With absolutely no evidence to present.

Look I can do it too.

HN is a community of users posting content that is interesting to its members, and influencing the popularity of that content by up/downvoting… OR IS IT??

It’s like an episode of vsauce that ends abruptly after the intro scene.

This is a comment that I have written… OR IS IT??