Why Is Mathematics So Successful?
The success of mathematics in describing the universe is a fact that most of us, even scientists like me, take for granted. Yet it is actually extremely surprising. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote an article over fifty years ago entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in which he repeatedly used the word “miracle” to describe this phenomenon.1 Why, he asked, do the same beautiful mathematical equations apply uniformly across all time and space? We could easily conceive of a universe that is wholly haphazard and chaotic, described by no underlying mathematics at all. Or we could conceive of a universe that is sporadically chaotic, where the laws of physics are occasionally suspended or altered every few years. Or we could conceive of a universe in which the laws of physics are not universal; they could vary from planet to planet or from galaxy to…
