Apparently, Lewis Carrol (not his real name) was so pissed off with the way Maths was being studied and thought about, he lampooned it in a now-famous children’s book – Alice in Wonderland.
While we are blessed to have such an entertaining story, I do rather think Charlie was just a bit of an old stodge. I mean, really. When was Maths ever anything but imagination?
In response to this:
Some have found resonance in abhorrence of all things mathematical – they would gladly frame Maths as Charlie did. But to understand how you should think about Maths, you must understand levels of abstraction.
Biology is Chemistry so long as you ignore systems behaviour.
Chemistry is Physics as long as you ignore the behaviour of long molecules.
Engineering is Physics so long as you ignore social obligations.
Physics is Maths so long as you ignore most of what we call material reality.
Maths is abstracted to the point of being imaginary. Imagine I label this object, which I arbitrarily describe as a single object, despite the fact it is made up of other objects, as one. Then, this other object I label two. In the next example, I will reverse this, because I can.
Now, I label this object one as well, this object as two as well – which is not confusing, apparently. Then, I count this one-two and this one-two and apparently I need more labels ‘three’ and ‘four’, except if I happen to be using base 2.
2 + 2 = 4
Yeah, you just made that up. See that four legged creature. It’s a unicorn. And don’t mind the caterpillar smoking on a mushroom. Alice says it’s all quite normal.