90% math history, 10% speculation

This book starts and ends with some limited agnostic speculation on whether math is discovered or invented, mostly a recounting of what others have said, but almost all its running time is a history of specific discoveries in math, I believe universally made by dead white European males, which was not painful to listen to but felt like a bait and switch from what the title promises. I wanted lofty abstract concepts, more philosophy, and this is mostly wikipedia anecdotes about history.

For me, the core question of math being discovered vs invented is "Why is there structure, regularity, pattern, order, symmetry in reality, such that humans can objectively discover more and more about it in a way that builds on itself?" I'm not sure Livio even sees the question this abstractly. Somewhat disappointingly, he mostly addresses the much more specific and concrete question of "Why has the historical development of professional Western math had the practical applications it has so far had?" About math being invented or discovered, he comes to a middle-ground position that some things like natural numbers are discovered and some things like the assignation of prime to some numbers are invented, contributing little to an answer of the titular question to what you can read in ten minutes on a free Google search.

His main quote in favour of the "invented" perspective seems to be from someone who gave the example of a jellyfish deep in the ocean which never experiences discrete objects like pebbles, just continuums of pressure and temperature, and thus never discovers even basic counting. From this the person quoted concludes that numbers are inventions based on humans' sensory experience of countable things. I don't follow. The deep sea jellyfish would also never see roses or the moon. Does that mean those objects are invented and not discovered? This is a core quote from the author's fav thinker on the subject and it seems absurd to me. Why would something's capacity to be overlooked imply it's an invention rather than a discovery?

I didn't have a bad time but I did feel fairly cheated and won't buy from Livio again.

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.