From a scholar of my acquaintance, John Reilly:
the article by George Johnson that appeared in the Science Section on February 16, 1998, entitled: “Useful Invention or Absolute Truth: What Is Math?” The piece was occasioned by a flurry of recent books challenging mathematical Platonism. This is the belief, shared by most mathematicians and many physicists, that mathematical ideas are “discovered” rather than constructed by the mathematicians who articulate them. Consider the following sentence:
“Because the whole point of science is to explain the universe without invoking the supernatural, the failure to explain rationally the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,’ as the physicist Eugene Wigner once put it, is something of a scandal, an enormous gap in human understanding.”
I, for one, was a little taken aback by the proposition that science had any “point” other than to describe the physical world as it actually is, but let that pass.
