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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

> "It is first necessary to ask what is meant by mathematics in general. Illustrious scholars have debated this matter until they were blue in the face, and yet no consensus has been reached about whether mathematics is a natural science, a branch of the humanities, or an art form."

There isn't yet a concensus as to whether mathematics is a science or not.

You may not think so, but it is currently a point of contention.

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Luckily, the existence of confused or insincere persons doesn't provide any evidence against my claims. Any pair of people who believe themselves to have a sincere disagreement about whether mathematics is science are in fact both mistaken; what they really have is a disagreement about what "science" is. Furthermore anyone who thinks mathematics is science must define science to be the whole sum of human knowledge (rendering the word meaningless) or else some uselessly large subset thereof.

> Luckily, the existence of confused or insincere persons doesn't provide any evidence against my claims. Any pair of people who believe themselves to have a sincere disagreement about whether mathematics is science are in fact both mistaken

The arrogance dripping from this statement is hard to not consider insulting, when such "confused" individuals include those such as Stephen Hawking, and Godel struggled with it for some time.

> what they really have is a disagreement about what "science" is.

No, the difficulty lies in defining the philosophy of mathematics. It's a tool underpinning nature, so despite its abstraction, does it explain the natural world? Proofs are most certainly empirical in nature.

The upshot is, better people than you or I say there is not yet an answer.

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