The idea that everything is mathematical goes back at least to the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece. In the 17th century, Galileo famously stated that our universe is a “grand book” written in the language of mathematics. More recently, the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner argued in the 1960s that “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” demanded an explanation.

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Is math discovered or invented?
Would mathematics exist if people didn't? Did we create mathematical concepts to help us understand the world around us, or is math the native language of the universe itself? Jeff Dekofsky traces some famous arguments in this ancient and hotly debated question.

The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”
Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” As difficult as turbulence is to understand mathematically, we can use art to depict the way it looks. Natalya St. Clair illustrates how Van Gogh captured this deep mystery of movement, fluid and light in his work.

Why can’t you divide by zero?
In the world of math, many strange results are possible when we change the rules. But there’s one rule that most of us have been warned not to break: don’t divide by zero. How can the simple combination of an everyday number and a basic operation cause such problems?

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