Nature Conformable to Herself (1992)

sfipress.org

21 pointslawrenceyan3 comments

> Eugene Wigner once wrote an article titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” I don’t know what he wrote in the article, but it is certainly a fact that, up to now, especially in the domain of fundamental physics, we have had striking success with our use of mathematics

It is odd that he mentions it only to say that he doesn’t know it.

I didn’t find the article main point particularly strong, but all the references and overall mentions were interesting.

The post is from 1992. Articles were much harder to get hold of back then, even if you were at academia. Your library would have had to have a subscription to the journal, and maintain an archive of it.

(The Unreasonable Effectiveness was published in a pure mathematics journal in 1960. The author of the post was a particle physicist, and seems to have read a fair share of literature in his time.)

SFI is sicky :)

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