Another way to put it: is math invented or discovered?
If you ask them, mathematicians may give opinion one way or the other, but they do not actually care very much, because this question has nothing to do with their work.
If you ask them, mathematicians may give opinion one way or the other, but they do not actually care very much, because this question has nothing to do with their work.
Yes and yes. Or to put it another way, why does it have to be an "or" question?
To me some things in math are discovered, like prime numbers, pi, Euler's number.
Other things are more like an invention, like the Runge-Kutta methods[1] or the Finite Element Method[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods
Indeed, this is more of a meta scientific, or epistemogic, question (edit: though it seems the French "épistemologie" is not really translatable to "epistemology" in English, at least not in its original meaning)
> Another way to put it: is math invented or discovered?
I think this is the question encompassed by constructivist epistemology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_o...
"If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right -- making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca -- then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of the Mines -- idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotated like no one else's -- could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein of undiscovered truths lay buried."