He may be off putting at times but when he gets in to it he can be very interesting to listen to.
(Constructivist mathematics is a thing, and it is pretty easy to formulate physics in a constructivist framework. Many serious quantum theoreticians do.)
- because if we had those tools we would not call them "compkex nonlinear phenomena".
- maybe, but what makes you think this one is the one?
However in the realm of applied math, linear functions rather uniquely have a set of standard algorithms which work on all classes of linear functions, which make them very, very easy to work with. And any non-linear function can be approximated to whatever level of detail you want just by adding more (linear) parameters. You can try solving your non-linear function slightly more exactly... but why bother?
It's like saying "why don't we have other models of computation besides a Turing machine?" to which the answer is: "we do. but every computation can be represented as a Turing machine, so why bother?"
This isn't perfect but something like, math express things while computation progresses things.
You could argue that a particular mathematical framework is computational but I'm just trying to exemplify a distinction.
I think your intuitions about how math works is an unfortunate side effect of how math is often taught, and not so much reflected in mathematics itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...