Ian Stewart FRS CMath FIMA is a celebrated author and

mathematician. Stewart's writing manages to fascinate minds in

seeing the world in a mathematical way— to discover more.

Under his array of work is Nature’s Numbers: The Unreal

Reality of Mathematics, a 1995 published piece that tells us the

universe is structured in a deeply mathematical way. In it is a

specific chapter wherein he presented examples, patterns,

discoveries by preeminent astronomer, mathematicians, and

scientists to elucidate what mathematics is for.

Ian Stewart starts the chapter by stating the purpose of each field of expertise

just like businessmen, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. He suggests that

some may be bad or good. Nonetheless, they have their specific goal and purpose.

And, for us, we all have our unique talents.

Mathematics, itself, also has its own use. It is focusing on what’s going on and

explaining the laws, patterns, regularities, and principles behind it. It dwells on the

logical reasoning of what is happening around us, especially our nature. (p. 14) The

chapter seeks to determine what we actually mean by “a pattern, coming to the

conclusion that we see a pattern in something that has symmetry, but not too much

symmetry – that is, broken symmetry.

Stuff like when going to work or at school to measure our time to avoid being

late; Foods that we are eating at home or at the restaurants are measured in so-called

ounces, cups and teaspoons; Athletes, whether runners, bikers, sailors or hikers often

have their own ways of charting their progress from time to mileage to elevation; Even
when traveling you estimate the amount of fuel you will need to plan out on a trip based

on miles per hour and distance travel. As you can see, all of that is possible through the

help of mathematics. However, mathematics is more than that. Mathematics is brilliant

at helping us to solve puzzles (p.14)

Johannes Kepler was a German

astronomer who was famous in the

discovery of the shape of planetary orbit.

Through Kepler’s discovery, the

astronomers were given a chance to plot

and time the positions of comets and

asteroids as they orbit the sun.

It is in human nature to be curious. So

much so that the uncertain must be broken down to become certain. Stewart mentioned

how mathematics does so well in explaining the universe as we see it (p. 15) that

includes when Isaac Newton made the epic discovery that the motion of an object is
described by a mathematical relation between the forces that act on the body and the

acceleration it experiences wherein Stewart mentioned that acceleration is a subtle

concept: it is not a fundamental quantity, such as length or mass; it is a rate of change.

In fact, it is a "second order" rate of change-that is, a rate of change of a rate of change.

The velocity of a body-the speed with which it moves in a given direction-is just a rate of

change: it is the rate at which the body's distance from some chosen point changes.

In order to handle questions

about rates of change, Newton and

German mathematician Gottfried

Leibniz invented a new branch of

mathematics, the calculus. When

they invented calculus and outlined

its uses, Isaac Newton made one of

the most important breakthroughs

in mathematics history, and it's still

vital to this day. It changed the face of the Earth-literally and metaphorically. (p. 16)

Newton started by trying to describe the speed of a falling object. When he did this, he

found that the speed of a falling object increases every second, but that there was no

existing mathematical explanation for this. The issue of movement and the rate of

change had not yet been explored to any significant degree in the field of mathematics,

so Newton saw a void that needed to be filled. He began work on this right way,

incorporating planetary ellipses into his theory too to try to explain the orbit of the

planets. He found that by using calculus, he could explain how planets moved and why
the orbits of planets are in an ellipse.  This is one of Newton's break throughs: that the

gravitational force that holds us to the ground is the same force that causes the planets

to orbit the Sun and the Moon to orbit Earth. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is another

mathematician who did a lot of work on using numbers to help describe nature and

motion. There was a dispute between the two men over who actually came up with

calculus first and who the true inventor was. Although Leibniz did come up with vital

symbols that help with the understanding of mathematical concepts, Newton's work was

carried out about eight years before Leibniz's. Both men contributed a great deal to

mathematics in general and calculus in particular. And since then, the concept has been

developed even further.

The discovery of genes-and later of

the molecular structure of DNA, the genetic

material-relied heavily on the existence of

mathematical clues. The monk Gregor

Mendel noticed tidy numerical relationships

in how the proportions of plants with

different characters, such as seed color,

changed when the plants were crossbred.

This led to the basic idea of genetics-that

within every organism is some cryptic

combination of factors that determines

many features of its body plan, and that these factors are somehow shuffled and
recombined when passing from parents to offspring. Many different pieces of

mathematics were involved in the discovery (p. 21).

Mathematics develops mathematical models to explain a certain phenomenon

(p. 21) one remarkable example of this kind of thinking is a computer simulation of

evolution of the eye by Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger published in 1994. The

mathematical model is set up as a computer program that makes tiny random changes

of this kind, calculates how good the resulting structure is at detecting light and

resolving the patterns that it "sees," and selects any changes that improve these

abilities. During a simulation that corresponds to a period of about four hundred

thousand years-the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms the region of cells folds itself

up into a deep, spherical cavity with a tiny iris like opening and, most dramatically, a

lens.

Mathematics organizes the underlying patterns and regularities in the most

satisfying way (p.22) Ancient human civilization organizes stars in the sky in terms of

features of animals and mythic forms. Mathematics predicts how nature will behave (p.

26) by understanding the motion of heavenly bodies, astronomers could predict the

lunar and solar eclipses. Also, the return of comets. In contrast, it is much harder to

predict the weather. We know just as much about the mathematics of weather as we do

about the mathematics of tides, but weather has an inherent unpredictability. Despite

this, meteorologists can make effective short-term predictions of weather patterns say,

three or four days in advance. The unpredictability of the weather, however, has nothing

at all to do with randomness. The role of mathematics goes beyond mere prediction.
 These examples bring us to the most down-to-earth aspect of mathematics: its

practical applications-how mathematics earns its keep. Our world rests on mathematical

foundations, and mathematics is unavoidably embedded in our global culture. All the

examples that were mentioned answer the question to what mathematics is for. The

only reason we don’t always realize just “how strongly” our lives are affected by

mathematics is that for sensible reason it is kept as far as possible behind the scenes.

To sum up, Whatever the reasons, mathematics definitely is a useful way to think

about nature. What do we want it to tell us about the patterns we observe? There are

many answers. We want to understand how they happen; to understand why they

happen, which is different; to organize the underlying patterns and regularities in the

most satisfying way; to predict how nature will behave; to control nature for our own

ends; and to make practical use of what we have learned about our world. Mathematics

helps us to do all these things, and often it is indispensable. Mathematics has its own

unique way of unleashing the hidden secrets of the world. Mathematics helps us to

understand and appreciate more the world we live in. Mathematics helps us organize

patterns and consistencies because mathematics exists everywhere. Mathematics is a

language that can help us understand the world. Whatever the ins and outs,

mathematics definitely is a way for us to understand our universe.

Indeed, mathematics is not just all about numbers, equations, computations or

algorithms; it is about understanding. The overall consensus of the group about chapter

2 is that nothing is truly random in this earth. What might seem as a cluster of erratic

actions actually are systematic. From a mathematical perspective, everything can be

calculated right down to their momentum, air resistance, gravity. However, due to the
limitations of human minds values at some point will not be exact, especially decimals

with their minuscule inconsistencies. The group learned that future cannot be predicted

based on the present. Truly, patterns may appear but as one gradually goes on, there

will be an observance of larger differences.

REFERENCES:

ile:///C:/Users/USER/Downloads/natures-numbers.pdf
http://math.hawaii.edu/~mchyba/documents/syllabus/Math499/Ethnomath/Ambrosio1.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics
https://www.mathnasium.ca/reasons-why-math-is-important-in-everyday-life
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029890.1997.11990657?
journalCode=uamm20
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g=aJc6WdCaLLpGIBeYFD_YNh9awMg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=dna
%20structure&f=false