Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

Think about this: In each strategic interaction between humans there exists a set of actions such that, for each of the participants, the action he chooses is the best one possible for him, taking into account everyone else's actions. This fact is astonishing in of itself; but what's even more incredible is that a fact like this happens to be an immediate consequence of an obscure and highly technical theorem of topology. Physicist Eugene Paul Wigner wrote a famous essay titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences;" but it seems that mathematics is unreasonably effective not just in the natural sciences but in pretty much anything we can think of.

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