Synthesis Paper on “Nature’s Numbers” by Ian Stewart

The book “Nature’s Number” by Ian Stewart talks about how Mathematics has influenced
us as of today. It informs us how Mathematics is literally in our surroundings without even noticing
it, on ways to process a certain circumstances with the help of Mathematics, application of
mathematics in our world, and the appreciation of Mathematics from its earliest discoveries until
today.

Our surroundings are full of patterns. As human minds getting more refined as days go by,
they were able to develop a process of recognizing, classifying and exploiting patterns around us.
It was called Mathematics. By learning and applying math, we have discovered great secrets;
patterns are vital clues to govern natural processes on our surroundings. There are two types of
patterns, the fractal and chaos. Fractals are geometric shapes the repeat their structure on ever-
finer scales such as trees, flowers, etc. while Chaos is a kind of apparent randomness whose origins
are entirely deterministic. The idea of moving of an animal or person can be considered having a
pattern. In addition to numerical patterns, the shapes such as triangles, squares, pentagons, etc. are
a collection of dots. Because of the development of various mathematical theories, more tricky
patterns of nature started to reveal its secrets as time goes by. But after establishing that nature is
full of patterns, “What would we want to do with them?” because of this question, every person
has different instincts to it throughout the years. But mathematics is sharp at helping in solving
puzzles, it is a systematic way of digging the structures that lie behind patterns in order to explain
what’s going on. Isaac Newton, a very influential scientist, discovered that a motion of an object
is described by a mathematical relation between force acting on the body and acceleration it
experiences and together with a German mathematician Gottfried Liebniz, they were able to invent
a new branch of mathematics, the Calculus. But for about 200 years, humanity was very curious
as regards to calculus, physicists were gaining success from it, mathematicians were worried about
what it really meant and how to set it as a mathematical theory, and philosophers were arguing that
it is nonsense. The story of calculus brings out two of the main things that mathematics is for, it
provides as tools that let scientists calculate what nature is doing, and provides questions for
mathematicians to sort out to their own satisfaction. But what does it want to tell us about the
patterns we observe? Because of mathematics, we want to understand how they happen; to
understand why they happen, to organize the patterns in the most satisfying way; to predict how
nature will behave; to control nature for our own ends; and to make practical use of what we have
learned about the world. Because of mathematical clues, another scientist, Gregor Mendel was
able to discover genetics. He noticed tidy numerical relationships on how the proportions of plants
with different characters, such as seed color, changed when plants are crossbred. With his
discovery, this led to the basic idea of genetics-that every organism is some cryptic combination
of factors that determines many features of its body plan, and these factors are somehow shuffled
and recombined when passing from parents to offspring. It starts with a mathematical model of a
flat region of cells, and permits various types of "mutation." Mathematics also has another
function, called prediction. By understanding the motion of heavenly bodies, astronomers could
predict lunar and solar eclipses and the return of comets. These examples tells us the different
aspect of mathematics: its practical applications-how mathematics earns its keep. Our world rests
on mathematical foundations, and mathematics is unavoidably embedded in our global culture.
When we hear the word "mathematics," the first thing that comes up to mind is numbers. Numbers
as common knowledge, is the heart of mathematics, the raw materials out of which a great deal of
mathematics is forged. But numbers on its own form, are only a tiny part of mathematics. Without
the ability to count eggs and subtract change, for instance, we could not even buy food. And so we
teach arithmetic. To everybody, its absence is a major handicap. In fact, counting began long
before there were symbols like 1, 2, 3, because it is possible to count without using numbers at all,
like counting on your fingers, using clay disks with picture of a certain animal to count them, and
scratches on wood or bone. Though even they had this ways to count, they were able to come up
different ways to count or value things and improve our ways of applying math as of today such
as adding 0 in number system, using fractions, including real numbers, applying
operations(addition, subtraction, etc.) to two or more mathematical objects, and so on.
Mathematical "things" doesn’t exist in the real world: they are abstractions. But mathematical
processes are also abstractions, so processes are no less "things" than the "things" to which they
are applied. For many centuries, human thought about nature has swung between two opposing
points of view. According to one view, the universe obeys fixed, immutable laws, and everything
exists in a well-defined objective reality. The rise of science has largely been governed by the first
viewpoint. In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and
greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of
cold and untinctured reason. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the
magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the
visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual
inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. The universe may appear to be a storm-tossed ocean
of change, but Newton and before him Galileo and Kepler, the giants upon whose shoulders he
stood-realized that change obeys rules. Not only can law and flux coexist, but law generates flux.
But at that time the perceived task of mathematics was to discover the catalogue of "ideal forms"
employed by nature. Nature, the creation of higher beings, is by definition perfect, and ideal forms
are mathematical perfection, so of course the two go together. And perfection was thought to be
unblemished by change. Newton's law of motion teaches an important lesson: namely, that the
route from nature's laws to nature's behavior need not be direct and obvious. Maybe nature's
patterns and regularities have other origins; but, at the very least, mathematics is an extremely
effective way for human beings to come to grasp with those patterns. Why did people want a
formula in the first place? Because in the early days of dynamics, that was the only way to work
out what kind of motion would occur. Later, the same information could be deduced from
approximations. Nowadays, it can be obtained from theories that deal directly and precisely with
the main qualitative aspects of the motion. It has become conventional, to separate mathematics
into two distinct sub-disciplines, labeled pure mathematics and applied mathematics. It is possible
to have a fairly good grasp of the whole mathematics, but because of the classical branches of
science have grown so broad that no single mind can likely encompass. Unfortunately, it is then
very tempting for the world to assume that the only useful part of mathematics is applied
mathematics; that is what the name seems to imply. Anything really useful inevitably ends up
being considered applied, no matter its origins may have been. But it gives a distorted view of the
origins of new mathematics of practical importance. Good ideas are rare, but they come at least as
often from imaginative dreams about the internal structure of mathematics as they do to solve a
specific, practical problem. Imagine an idealized violin string, as you pull it sideways, its elastic
tension increases which produces a force that pulls the string back toward its original position.
When you let go, it begins to accelerate under the action of this force, obeying Newton's law of
motion. As the understanding of the wave equation grew, the mathematicians of the eighteenth
century learned to solve the wave equation for the motion of drums of various shapes. The same
equation began to show up everywhere. It showed up in fluid dynamics, in the theory of sound,
and then it showed up in the theories of electricity and magnetism, and changed human culture
forever. Electricity and magnetism have a long, complicated history, far more complex than that
of the wave equation, involving accidental discoveries and key experiments as well as
mathematical and physical theories.
Symmetry is a mathematical concept, it allows us to classify different types of regular
pattern and distinguish between them. Symmetry breaking is a more dynamic idea, describing
changes in pattern. There are many different kinds of symmetry. The most important ones are
reflections, rotations, and translations-or, less formally, flips, turns, and slides. Nature's
symmetries can be found on every scale, from the structure of subatomic particles to that of the
entire universe. Symmetry breaking is just such a principle. But in order for symmetry to break, it
has to be present to start with. If something is symmetric, its component features are replaceable
or interchangeable. The mathematical principles of symmetry-breaking works for any system with
the same symmetries-anything that flows across a planar surface creating patterns. Life itself is a
process of symmetry creation-of replication; the universe of biology is just as mass-produced as
the universe of physics, and the organic world therefore exhibits many of the patterns found in the
inorganic world. The same basic method of pattern formation, the same mechanism of symmetry
breaking in a mass-produced universe, governs the cosmos, the atom, and us. Nature is nothing if
not rhythmic, and its rhythms are many and varied. Many of nature's rhythms are like the heartbeat:
they take care of themselves, running "in the background." Others are like breathing: there is a
simple "default" pattern that operates as long as nothing unusual is happening, but there is also a
more sophisticated control mechanism that can kick in when necessary. Controllable rhythms of
this kind are particularly common-and particularly interesting-in locomotion. In legged animals,
the default patterns of motion that occur when conscious control is not operating are called gaits.
The organizing principle behind many such biological cycles is the mathematical concept of an
oscillator-a unit whose natural dynamic causes it to repeat the same cycle of behavior over and
over again. Some animals possess only one gait-only one rhythmic default pattern for moving their
limbs. The elephant, for example, can only walk, while other animals possess many different gaits.
Take the horse, for example. At low speeds, horses walk; at higher speeds, they trot; and at top
speed they gallop. Some insert yet another type of motion, a canter, between a trot and a gallop.
The ability to switch gaits comes from the dynamics of CPGs (Central Pattern Generator). The
basic idea behind CPG models is that the rhythms and the phase relations of animal gaits are
determined by the natural oscillation patterns of relatively simple neural circuits. The possible
transitions between gaits are also organized by symmetry. The faster the animal moves, the less
symmetry its gait has: more speed breaks more symmetry. Nature's rhythms are often linked to
symmetry, and that the patterns that occur can be classified mathematically by invoking the general
principles of symmetry breaking. Mathematics can illuminate many aspects of nature that we do
not normally think of as being mathematical. One of the most exciting new areas of mathematics,
nonlinear dynamics-popularly known as chaos theory. It is certainly creating a revolution in the
way we think about order and disorder, law and chance, predictability and randomness. According
to modern physics, nature is ruled by chance on its smallest scales of space and time. The most
precise measurements yet made in any physical system are correct to about ten or twelve decimal
places. For this reason, a system that displays sensitivity to initial conditions is said to be chaotic.
Chaos is not just complicated, patternless behavior; it is far more subtle. Chaos is apparently
complicated, apparently patternless behavior that actually has a simple, deterministic explanation.
It came about because of the conjunction of three separate developments. One was a change of
scientific focus, away from simple patterns such as repetitive cycles, toward more complex kinds
of behavior. The second was the computer, which made it possible to find approximate solutions
to dynamical equations easily and rapidly. The third was a new mathematical viewpoint on
dynamics-a geometric rather than a numerical viewpoint. The first provided motivation, the second
provided technique, and the third provided understanding. Chaos has its own rather weird
geometry: it is associated with curious fractal shapes called strange attractors. The discovery of
chaos has revealed a fundamental misunderstanding in our views of the relation between rules and
the behavior they produce-between cause and effect. We used to think that deterministic causes
must produce regular effects, but now we see that they can produce highly irregular effects that
can easily be mistaken for randomness. It tells us that the universe is far stranger than we think. A
chaotic system can react to outside events much more quickly, and with much less effort. Chaos
is a growth industry. Every week sees new discoveries about the underlying mathematics of chaos,
new applications of chaos to our understanding of the natural world, or new technological uses of
chaos. Chaos teaches us that systems obeying simple rules can behave in surprisingly complicated
ways. But the world cannot be totally chaotic, otherwise we would not be able to survive in it. In
fact, one of the reasons that chaos was not discovered sooner is that in many ways our world is
simple. That simplicity tends to disappear when we look below the surface, but on the surface it is
still there. For example, the statement "foxes chase rabbits" makes sense only because it captures
a general pattern of animal interaction. Foxes do chase rabbits, in the sense that if a hungry fox
sees a rabbit then it is likely to run after it. We must understand vision, pattern recognition in the
brain, and locomotion. Recently, a radically different approach has been advocated, under the
name complexity theory. Its central theme is that large-scale simplicities emerge from the complex
interactions of large numbers of components. Nature is, in its own subtle way, simple. However,
those simplicities do not present themselves to us directly. Instead, nature leaves clues for the
mathematical detectives to puzzle over.

Mathematics truly are around us. From simply recognizing patterns of our surroundings,
living and non-living things, to more complicated construction of formulas and theories, we were
able to understand a lot around us. Because of the presence of mathematics, it served as an aid to
expand the knowledge of science and create different kinds of instruments to be able to know about
the heavenly bodies and how big the universe is. Without those mathematical theories, formulas,
laws, and even those influential scientists, we may not be able to gather answers for things that are
unknown or even things that are literally there for a purpose and we may not be able to appreciate
most, or rather everything about the secrets, mysteries, and clues of our nature and everything
around us.