Maths And The World

What is the role of intuition in mathematics? How about imagination?

Andrew Wiles said he had a revelation when it came to Fermat’s last theorem, suggesting that he had an intuition, something he couldn’t explain but wanted to prove and understand. Intuition can play a role in math where it can help people discover new things as well as question other things and find rigorous proof for it, it can help drive people into discovering and learning new things that we want to call the ‘truth”. Imagination can play a big role in mathematics as it can challenge existing ideas and or help us create something new or a new way of thinking that we haven’t thought of before. Humans search for patterns in nature but we can use our imagination to explain something in nature, imagination can lead to a big discover and or can lead us to the bigger ‘truth’.

In what sense is Mathematical research a search for Truth?

Derren Brown suggests that humans search for patterns naturally. Mathematics is about finding patterns that hold true, if we see a pattern we lean towards it to say that it is true because it has happened before. Once people begin to see patterns we assume that it has a meaning behind it, that there is a truth, curiosity is what drives humans and if there was nothing to search for in math it  wouldn’t be as important as it is now.

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