Is mathematics already there, waiting to be discovered, or have we made it all up?

And how can we make maths fun for students to learn?

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

What do I mean? Well, let’s take a triangle. If you remember your maths rules, the internal angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees. Was that rule always existing, just waiting to be discovered, or have we simple observed the correlation with all triangles and made a rule to fit what we can see?

I think it was already there, waiting to be found. That means there could be more discoveries that we haven’t yet found. What a fascinating idea. That there could be more mathematical patterns in our world. It just needs a gifted mathematician to find it, and, perhaps, name it after him or herself.

Let’s use another analogy, but on a different topic. A well respected Dutch psychiatrist who worked with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) victims of the Vietnam war and later, children who suffered trauma, said, emotion lives in our body. What he meant was that although the event that caused the traumatic experience was long gone, the emotions live on, stored in the victim’s body. I can testify to that truth from personal experience.

We can’t see it, but it’s there anyway. Are we guilty of fitting explanations of emotional behaviour in trauma…