NATURE’S

NUMBER
• The objects that are found in the mathematician's
world are generally distinguished by symbolic
labels or names rather than colors. (ix)

• Mathematicians are forced to resort to written

symbols and pictures to describe their world-
even to each other. But the symbols are no more
that world than musical notation is music. (ix)

• the mental universe of mathematics has provided

human beings with many of their deepest insights
into the world around them. (x)
 The Natural Order
• We live in a universe of patterns.
• Human mind and culture have developed a
formal system of thought for recognizing,
classifying, and exploiting patterns.
• By using mathematics, we have discovered a
great secret: nature's patterns
• are vital clues to the rules that govern natural
processes.
• The regular nightly motion of the stars is also
a clue, this time to the fact that the Earth
rotates.
• Waves and dunes are clues to the rules that
govern the flow of water, sand, and air.
• The tiger's stripes attest to mathematical
regularities in biological growth and form.
• Lunar haloes are clues to the shape of ice
crystals.
• The planets were clues to the rules behind
gravity and motion.
• Once we have learned to recognize a
background pattern, exceptions suddenly
stand out.
• The desert stands still, but the lion moves.
• Against the circling background of stars, a
small number of stars that move quite
differently beg to be singled out for special
attention. (I-3)
• two types of pattern now known as fractals
and chaos.
• Fractals are geometric shapes that repeat
their structure on ever-finer scales.
• chaos is a kind of apparent randomness
whose origins are entirely deterministic.
• clouds are fractal and weather is chaotic.
• The simplest mathematical objects are
numbers,
• and the simplest of nature's patterns are
numerical.
• The phases of the moon make a complete cycle
from new moon to full moon and back again
every twenty-eight days.

• The year is three hundred and sixty-five days

long-roughly.

• People have two legs, cats have four, insects have

six, and spiders have eight.

• Lilies have three petals, buttercups have five,

many delphiniums have eight, marigolds have
thirteen, asters have twenty-one, and most
daisies have thirty-four, fifty-five, or eighty-nine.
• the main shapes that appealed to
mathematicians were very simple ones:
triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons,
circles, ellipses, spirals, cubes, spheres, cones,
and so on.
• All of these shapes can be found in nature,
although some are far more common, or more
evident, than others.
• The rainbow is a collection of circles.
• You also see circles in the ripples on a pond.
• Talking of ripples, the flow of fluids provides an
inexhaustible supply of nature's patterns.
• There are waves of many different kinds-surging
toward a beach in parallel ranks
• Nature's love of stripes and spots extends into
the animal kingdom, with tigers and leopards,
zebras and giraffes.
• Why is that symmetry so often imperfect,
disappearing when you look at the detail?

Finally, there is another category of natural pattern-

one that has captured human imagination only very
recently, but dramatically. This comprises patterns
that we have only just learned to recognize-patterns
that exist where we thought everything was
random and formless.
NATURE’S
NUMBER

Watch movie clip: A string theory explained-

 What Mathematics is for
• We've now established the uncontroversial idea that
nature is full of patterns. But what do we want to do
with them?
• Each of nature's patterns is a puzzle, nearly always a
deep one. Mathematics is brilliant at helping us to
solve puzzles. It is a more or less systematic way of
digging out the rules and structures that lie behind
some observed pattern or regularity, and then using
those rules and structures to explain what's going on.

• People interpret new discoveries in terms of what is

important to them.
• All sorts of astronomical phenomena, such as
eclipses, meteor showers, and comets, might
yield to the same kind of mathematics. The
message to mathematicians was quite
different.
• It was that ellipses are really interesting
curves.
• One of the strangest features of the
relationship between mathematics and the
"real world,“ but also one of the strongest, is
that good mathematics, whatever its source,
eventually turns out to be useful.
• mathematics is the science of patterns, and
nature exploits just about every pattern that
there is.
 What do we want it to tell us about
the patterns we observe?
• We want to understand how they happen;
• to understand why they happen, which is
different;
• to organize the underlying patterns and
regularities 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 our world.
• The only reason we don't always realize just how strongly our
lives are affected by mathematics is that, for sensible
reasons, it is kept as far as possible behind the scenes.

• But somebody had to understand all these things in the past,

otherwise airliners, television, spacecraft, and disease
resistant potatoes wouldn't have been invented.

• And somebody has to understand all these things now, too,

otherwise they won't continue to function.

• And somebody has to be inventing new mathematics in the

future, able to solve problems
• that either have not arisen before or have hitherto proved
intractable, otherwise our society will fall apart when change
requires solutions to new problems or new solutions to old
problems.
• we must run very fast in order to stand still.
 What Mathematics is about
• When we hear the word "mathematics," the
first thing that springs to mind is numbers.
• The simplest are the numbers we use for
counting. In fact, counting began long before
there were symbols like 1, 2, 3, because it is
possible to count without using numbers at
all-say, by counting on your fingers.
• The use of symbols for numbers probably
developed about five thousand years ago
• The next invention beyond counting numbers
was fractions
• Much later, between 400 and 1200 AD, the
concept of zero was invented and accepted as
denoting a number. If you think that the late
acceptance of zero as a number is strange, bear
in mind that for a long time "one" was not
considered a number because it was thought that
a number of things ought to be several of them.

• Fun Maths Starter 6_ Stand and deliver Clips. 9

times table and negative numbers.mp4
• The next extension of the number concept was
the invention of negative numbers.
• In current terminology, the whole numbers 0, 1,
2, 3, ... are known as the natural numbers. If
negative whole numbers are included, we have
the integers. Positive and negative fractions are
called rational numbers. Real numbers are more
general; complex numbers more general still. So
here we have five number systems, each more
inclusive than the previous: natural numbers,
integers, rationals, real numbers, and complex
numbers.
• However, mathematics is not just about numbers.
We've already had a passing encounter with a
different kind of object of mathematical thought,
an operation;
• The image of mathematics raised by this
description of its basic objects is something like a
tree.
• it is more like a landscape
• The ingredient that knits this landscape together
is proof .
• To professional mathematicians, no statement is
considered valid unless it is proved beyond any
possibility of logical error.
• The Best Movies For Mathematicians.mp4
 The Constants of Change
• According to one view, the universe obeys
fixed, immutable laws, and everything exists in
a well-defined objective reality.

• The opposing view is that there is no such

thing as objective reality; that all is flux, all is
change.
• Notice that this approach again changes the
meaning of "solve."
• First that word meant "find a formula."
• Then its meaning changed to "find approximate
numbers."
• Finally, it has in effect become "tell me what
the solutions look like."
• In place of quantitative answers, we seek
qualitative ones.
• there are qualitative aspects to the solution
that a formula cannot capture.
• For the first time, we are starting to
understand nature's patterns in their own
terms.
 From Violins to Video
• It is a story in which the pure and applied
aspects of mathematics combine to yield
something far more powerful and compelling
than either could have produced alone.
• the problem of the vibrating violin string
• A-Standing Waves and Harmonics.mp4
• A-What is Light_ Maxwell and the
Electromagnetic Spectrum.mp4
• A-Michio Kaku_ The Universe Is a Symphony of
Vibrating Strings.mp4
• But the next time you go jogging wearing a
Walkman, or switch on your TV, or watch a
videotape, pause for a few seconds to remember
that without mathematicians none of these
marvels would ever have been invented,
 Chap 4. Broken Symmetry
• Something in the human mind is attracted to
symmetry.
• perfect symmetry is repetitive and predictable
• Nature, too, seems to be attracted to symmetry,
for many of the most striking patterns in the
natural world are symmetric.
• And nature also seems to be dissatisfied with too
much symmetry, for nearly all the symmetric
patterns in nature are less symmetric than the
causes that give rise to them.
• Ripples on a pond are examples of broken
symmetry. An ideal mathematical plane has a
huge amount of symmetry: every part of it is
identical to every other part.
A-Pond ripple.mp4
A-Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction.mp4

An infinitesimal cause produces a large-scale

effect, and that effect is a symmetric pattern.
 Do Dice play God?
• Is our world deterministic, as Laplace claimed, or
is it governed by chance, as it so often seems to
be?
• "sensitivity to initial conditions," or more
informally "the butterfly effect.“
• a system that displays sensitivity to initial
conditions is said to be chaotic. Chaotic behavior
obeys deterministic laws, but it is so irregular that
to the untrained eye it looks pretty much
random. 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.
• A-Nature's Numbers.mp4