Is Math a human creation or an intrinsic element of the Nature?

Is Math invented or discovered? Is it a human creation or an intrinsic element of the nature? Question has been answered by many from Pythogoras to today’s age scientists. And while the answer is that it’s a mix of both; it’s the never-ending thought-provoking arguments from both the sides which makes this question interesting.

Going back to initial days of civilizations; Math was inspired and discovered from the observations in the Nature. Earlier humans wondered about shapes of objects around them, tress, rocks, and it also helped them invent tools to hunt. Patterns of constellations on a starry night made us think and wonder. Observations led to discovery of geometry.

When humans had to make decisions on how much to hoard or how to distribute things within a group; counting & arithmetic operations became the basic needs. Necessities forced us to adapt Math as way of life. While different civilization developed different ways of counting & doing calculations; principle & underlying philosophy was always the same. Going by this logic Math seems to be more of a discovery. Ratio of perimeter to diameter as pi existed even before life came to earth. Laws of nature followed some form of equation and were just waiting to be discovered.

But there is another aspect to it. We started theorizing Math to an extent that we started creating what didn’t even exist before. As we moved forward building complex systems like trade, money & organizations, Mathematics changed a lot to serve the new purpose & it is still evolving, to create artificial intelligence, to design rocket-ships & what not.

With laws of Geometry, we are now able to design any possible shape and it can happen that the crafted shape might not even exist in this vast nature. We have understood the laws of physic to decipher various events which gives us power to even predict the future; say life cycle of a star, eruption of a volcano or even future of Nature’s evolution itself. It’s Math which tells us that how long exactly we have before sun engulfs earth & other planets. We have created mathematical equations to describe behavior from atomic particles to galaxies. It’s difficult to rule out that such a sophisticated tool is not one of most beautiful creation of human.