Posts Tagged theory
Mathematics and Faith
Just how does an abstract discipline like mathematics find itself mixed up with a notion as difficult to pin down as that of faith. What is this thing called faith anyway? As far as I can see, I never saw faith walking around, nor was I ever able to touch it. As much as I might have wanted a heavy dose of faith as a Christmas present some years, I do not ever remember anyone telling me that they just picked me up a nice piece of faith in the local mall and got a great deal on it.
In the Book of Hebrews of the New Testament of the Bible we read in Chapter 11, Verse 1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This has always been one of my favorite Bible verses I guess because of the profound implications of the statement. Faith has to be one of the greatest gifts with which God could have endowed man. Yet faith—in order to grow strong— is something that needs to be put into practice regularly, just like any other muscle in the body. Use it, or lose it, as the saying goes. Faith strengthens with use while it weakens through desuetude. Faith is simply not like some other tangible thing that you can get your finger around. Consequently, to embrace this elusive yet noble grace, man needs some kind of driver to bring faith to the surface of existence, a precursor, so to speak, which causes faith to bubble into one’s life and permits easy access to such.
The History of Mathematics
Mathematics has been in people’s lives from the beginning of time. Even in prehistory was a person required to perform mathematical tasks. The number of hunters, tools or members of a family were probably shown by the fingers on one or more hands, which is probably why today’s number systems are based on the number 5 or 10.
The second step probably arose out of the need to organise greater quantities: such as between young and older hunters, light or heavy weaponry, large or small hides.
Finding a Mall Parking Spot Using Mathematics
If you read the previous article on this topic, then I imagine you were quite piqued by the nature of its contents. How we use mathematics to find a mall parking spot is not a typical thing you would hear people discussing at their Christmas parties. Yet I think anyone with a modicum of human interest would find this a most curious topic of conversation. The reaction I usually get is one of “Wow. How do you do that”, or “You can really use mathematics to find a parking spot”
As I mentioned in the first article, I was never content to get my degrees in mathematics and then not do anything with them other than to leverage job opportunities. I wanted to know that this newly found power that I studied feverishly to obtain could actually inure to my personal benefit that I would be able to be an effective problem solver, and not just for those highly technical problems but also for more mundane ones such as the case at hand. Consequently, I am constantly probing, thinking, and searching for ways of solving everyday problems, or using mathematics to help optimize or streamline an otherwise mundane task. This is exactly how I stumbled upon the solution to the Mall Parking Spot Problem.
Mathematics is the Science of Patterns
Science has been a way of Man interpreting his environment and making an acceptable law that those who were interested to look in to these things could follow on and add their own experience. Art on the other hand has always been seen as Man’s way expressing himself abstractly without any particle constraints and is often deemed as the opposite of Science. But I have come to see the effects of both being felt on the other. This is so based on the fact that I am an intellectual that has been deeply rooted in the Sciences but yet I am also a man who loves to express himself in deep thought or discourse, poem, song or otherwise. To go one step further, my area of expertise and physical gifting is both in the area of Mathematics. As much as I have been gifted and have succeeded academically in Mathematics, my love and fascination has always been on one of the most intriguing tools Man has been able to fashion, The Computer. I have always seen this tool as the perfect marriage between Science and Art! It allows the most complex patterns to be printed on fabric and other materials that ordinarily would be unthinkable to do so, such as glass and plastic. Not only does this tool allow such complex replication such as printing which is not Art (the artist may say) but they are having the ability to analyze the same replicated patterns not only with respect to how they are seen (the most used form of conscious human perception) but other factors that human perception could never fathom conscious or unconscious. It is also no strange coincidence that the Computer is based on the fundamentals of Mathematics. It is worthwhile to go into some detail about how Mathematics the fundamental element in Computer Science, that which motivated the Computer allowed us to encapsulate from the very basic to incomprehensibly complex.
The very structure of Mathematics is based on patterns formed in and around Man’s own existence. Mathematics is its earliest forms is equivalent to Logic and Reasoning and the concept of quantity is not the obvious, but is the only way that Man has been able to make a strong case for Logical Statements and Reasons why things are the way they are. Strange is it? But it is true the concept of Numbers has opened the senses of Man to interpret, predict, encapsulate, simulate and demonstrate almost all forms of Nature. Art on the other hand is by no means inferior, since the natural expression that comes from Artistic sculpting, painting, writing, dreaming and imagination can never be reproduced or encapsulated by Science and specifically the Science of Numbers. It gives us a timely reminder that Man is definitely unique and lord of his domain as far as his environment is concerned. And yet with the advances of the Pattern Finding Tool he can come really close to doing so.