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Is God een wiskundige

Mario Livio, Maarten Doude van Troostwijk (Translator)

Record Cover: Is God een wiskundige
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Bibliographic Data

STATUS: FINISHED
Pages Count 350
Publisher Veen Magazines
Pub Date 2009-01-01
Date Archived August 1, 2014
Registry ID 9789085713166

Summary

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history’s greatest mathematicians to ask how—if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind—it can so perfectly explain the physical world. Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that—mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented or discovered? If, as Einstein insisted, mathematics is “a product of human thought that is independent of experience,” how can it so accurately describe