Natures Numbers

By: Ian Stewart

Mathematics, The First thing to our mind is about numbers, real , complex , functions, transformations, proofs,
theorems. No , Math is about story telling. If you can take a natural phenomenon / application and can a tell an
effective story using some tools, that is what Math is all about.
On the first chapter told us that “We lived in a universe of patterns” like the patterns of stars not also in our heavenly
bodies but in our animals like Tigers and Zebra’s are covered in patterns of spots. Also, colored of light adorn in the
form of rainbows, Spherical drops of water fall from clouds. This chapter mentioned kepler that he evidenced was the
sixfold symmetry of snowflakes, which is natural consequences of regular packing. And the author says in this
chapter that patterns possess utility as well as beauty.
Once we have learn to recognize a background pattern, exceptions suddenly stand out. We learn in this chapter that
mathematics are also connected to science that we noticed, like understanding the patterns of planetary motion than
it did to work out why stars seem to move in nightly circles and also solar system.

Patterns are basically numerical patterns, geometric patterns, and movement (translation, rotation, reflection)
patterns. A mathematician’s instinct is to structure the process of understanding by seeking generalities that cut
across various sub divisions.A lot of physics proceeded with out the any major advances in the mathematical world.
For 200 years, calculus was in a different position. It was being used with great success in Physics But the
mathematicians were really concerned about what it really meant. Thus there is a fundamental difference in the way
of thinking of a mathematician.
They tend to ask WHY rather than HOW. HOW related questions are left to domain experts, be it physicists ,
chemists, scientists etc Mathematicians concentrate on WHY and that opens a whole set of areas for people to work
on HOWs. For example snail develops a spiral shell, mathematician will be interested in the ways a spiral is formed
whereas how the snail makes the shell is matter of genetics / chemistry.

The second chapter is What mathematics for, So, Mathematics is for our daily lives like buying something you ask
the price that you’re going to buy. Also the story of calculus brings out two of the main things that mathematics is for
providing tools that let scientists calculate what nature is going and providing new questions for mathematicians to
sort out their pen satisfaction. These are the external and Internal aspects of mathematics often referred to as
applied and Pure mathematics (I dislike both adjectives and I dislike the implied separation even more) Mathematics
made things better by enforcing it with some other things like knowing how gravity works, how acceleration became
rate of change of the world through explaining the planetary movements.

In the third chapter is What mathematics is about when we hear the word “Mathematics” the first thing that springs to
our mind is numbers. Numbers are the heart of mathematics an all pervading influence, the raw materials put of
which a great deal of Mathematics is forged. Steward mentioned that we live in an intensely mathematical world, but
that whenever possible the mathematics is sensibly tucked under the rug to make our world “user friendly”.
Communing
with nature does all of us good: it reminds us of what we are.
Painting pictures, sculpting sculptures, and writing poems are valid and important ways to express our feelings about
the world and about ourselves. The entrepreneur's instinct is to exploit the natural world. The engineer's instinct is to
change it. The scientist's instinct is to try to understand it-to work out what's really going on. The mathematician's
instinct is to structure that process of understanding by seeking generali-ties that cut across the obvious subdivisions.
There is a little of all these instincts in all of us, and there is both good and bad in each instinct. Stewart show to us
what the mathematical instinct has done for human understanding, but first I want to touch upon the role of
mathematics in human culture. Before you buy something, you usually have a fairly clear idea of what you want to do
with it. If it is a freezer, then of course you want it to preserve food, but your thoughts go well beyond that.

In this chapter, Steward try to showed us some of the others and explain why they, too important. Inevitably his
staring point has to be numbers The simplest are the numbers we use for 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.

There is a chapter titles “From Violins to Videos” which is a beautiful summarization of the events starting from the
purposeless study of 1d strings on a violin to a very practical device tv. A lot of physicists and mathematicians played
a role in cracking the 1d wave equation of a violin string. jean le rond d’alemert , euler, bernoulli all were instrumental
in bringing about the solution for 1d waves. This was extended to the vibrations of the surface of the drum which is a
2d. Finally it showed up in the areas of Electricity and Magnetism. Michael Faraday and subsequently Maxwell came
up with electromagnetic forces which was a giant leap in the advancement of scientific understanding. Visible
electromagnetic waves with different frequencies produce different colors.

The book also deals with the pattern of movement. One complete chapter is dedicated to gait analysis where
trot,pace, bound, walk, rotary, gallop, traverse gallop and canter is analyzed.

Chapter 8 titled – "Do Dice Play God ?" is my favorite chapter of the book. It starts off by introducing a concept
called phase space which is nothing but a solution space that is obtained based on the initial conditions. The
chapter’s main theme is that random movements at the microscopic level can result in deterministic movements at
the macroscopic level. Also simple cause results in complex effects

. One superb example that’s given to justify the theme is the half life period. One can never say that at an instant a
particular atom will disintegrate or not, but one can always calculate half life period of an elements. So, one knows
the half life of an elements, with out knowing which half will disintegrate.

Its like the famous ad saying, I know my marketing ad budget gets me results but I do not know which half. In our
daily lives, we encounter innumarable cases where laplacian determinism seems to be a highly inappropriate model.
We talk safely down steps a thousand times, until one day we turn our ankle and break it. We go to a tennis match
amd it is rained off by an unexpected thunder storm. We place a bet on the favorite in a horse race and it falls at the
last fence when it is six lengths ahead of the field. It’s not so much a universe in which as Albert Einteins memorably
refused to believe God play dice it seems more a universe in which dice play God.
In our world deterministic, as laplace claimed or is it governed by chance as it often seems to be? And if laplace is
really right why does so much or experience indicate that he is wrong? One of the most exciting new areas of
mathematics non linear dynamics popularly known as chaos theory claims to have many of the answers. Whether or
not it does, it is certainly creating a revolution in the way we think about order and disorder law and chance.

The last chapter is collection of 3 case studies – One , water from a tap , Two , a simulated artificial ecology example,
and the final one is that of petals in various flowers. Each of the case studies is a gem that goes on tell that
mathematical complexity results in simple patterns and it is well worth understanding mathematical complexity , for it
is such study that creates a better understanding of nature’s patterns.

Dijah Mie Rico

BSED- General Science 1

GmathMod

First Semester S.Y 2019-2020