Talk:Unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics
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This article appears to have been written by someone who has a beef against mathematics.
I think this item is somewhat misrepresented - it looks like a formal paper on a legitimate subject about mathematics. Instead it should be made more clearly a philosophy speculation. The original paper by Wigdin uses the same logic used by proponents of Intelligent Design, namely that it stresses the credibility angle - that the author is surprised that mathematics could be this effective, and that there is something not quite right about that ("unreasonable"). Mathematicians and physicists might well find this opinion ignorant. It is probably an interesting philosophy question, but the Wikipedia page makes it look like a legitimate subject instead of a couple of people's musings.
Since the question is raised, and has an associated catch phrase I think Wikipedia should have a page on it, but should put it in the correct light, which it does not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alwhaley (talk • contribs) 12:35, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
This is indeed a philosophical question rather than mathematical. The discussion is a very very interesting one though. But shouldn't there have been a more general article regarding the "Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics" on the original article? Here the "ineffectiveness" in other fields would come in as a subsection.
One more thing: The ineffectiveness is has nothing to do with maths being useless, as one can be lead to believe by reading this article. It means that the spectacular results from physics cannot be reproduced in other fields. Wigner argues that this is what we should have expected, also in physics.
Linguafranca81 (talk) 12:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
