Mathematics and Science 1

Causation and Correlation in Mathematical Discovery and Scientific Progress

Eric M. Hodge February 22, 2010

Mathematics and Science 2 Abstract This paper examines the relationship between mathematical discoveries and progress in other scientific disciplines. Five specific mathematical developments were examined in their historical context as representative of breakthroughs in their fields and compared to their effect on scientific developments. This researcher predicted that mathematical discoveries would precede scientific progress in accordance with Dr. William Dunhams assertion that mathematics drives science. This researcher discovered through qualitative analysis of mathematical and scientific discoveries that the relationship between the two cannot be described as causative but is still more complex than simple correlation. In some cases mathematical discovery displayed a causative force on scientific progress, and in other cases scientific progress displayed a causative force on mathematics. This suggests that the relationship between mathematical discovery and scientific progress is not intrinsically causative in either direction but may be correlative due to the specific paradigm that scientific research is being conducted in.

Mathematics and Science 3

Causation and Correlation in Mathematical Discovery and Scientific Progress Mathematics and the other sciences have always enjoyed a relationship of mutual support. Since the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s, scientific disciplines, especially the natural sciences, have based all their conclusions on the foundations of mathematical rigor. Physics, biology, chemistry, economics and even linguistics have all benefited, at one point or another, from improvements in mathematics, and at times mathematical discovery has even catapulted science in entirely new directions and spawned entirely new sciences. But what is the actual relationship between mathematics and all the other scientific disciplines? Is mathematics merely a supportive science that provides impressive and extremely useful tools to scientists and engineers of other disciplines, or is it a driving force in science that provides new direction to old scientific ideas and inspires true innovation? The answer is complex. Dr. Salomon Bochner, Ph.D., argued that the role of mathematics in the rise of science is more causative than is generally given credit. The Greeks, specifically, in Bochners esteem are largely responsible for the Scientific Revolution. Professor William Dunham likewise argues that mathematics is usually 100 years ahead of science, and that scientific progress almost always follows naturally from mathematical discovery. It is true that the Scientific Revolution coincides very closely with the Renaissance rediscovery of specific mathematical texts from the classical world. Correlation does not equal causation, though, and Bochners assertions must be examined more closely to see if they have validity. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn suggests more esoterically

Mathematics and Science 4 that scientific discoveries occur within a paradigm of scientific research similar to a mode and that breaking this paradigm is only the result of a multitude of mathematical and observational inconsistencies that invalidate it. In this case, the relationship between mathematical discovery and scientific research would be correlative within the specific paradigm of research. The specific nature of the relationship between mathematical discovery and scientific progress will help future mathematicians and scientists identify the applicability of specific mathematical discoveries to the other scientific disciplines and possibly point to areas where current mathematics are lacking in their ability to describe observed scientific phenomena. In the 15th and 16th centuries the scholastic understanding of cosmology was overturned by the work of three men: Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler. These three men respectively established several important principles, among them that: (1) The Earth revolves around the Sun, (2) falling bodies fall with uniform acceleration, and (3) the planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits according to fundamental laws of inertia. While groundbreaking, these three nascent scientists all used the primarily Eudoxian mathematics of the time. It was not until the 17 th century that new mathematics was developed to unify these three mens observations into a single, cohesive set of natural laws. The Calculus as it is studied today was independently developed by two mathematicians in the 17th century: Sir Isaac Newton of England and Gottfried Leibniz of Germany. While Leibniz was attempting to solve the metaphysical tangent problem (in accordance with his role as a philosopher), it was Newton who was specifically attempting to solve specific problems that had arisen in his mathematical examinations of

Mathematics and Science 5 Keplers work on the movements of celestial bodies. Newton developed his Method of Fluents and Method of Fluxions as an answer to these problems and, in doing so, created the first systems for what we today call integral and differential calculus. Here, then, we have an example of scientific discovery, through observation, driving mathematical inquiry in direct contradiction to the assertions of Bochner and Dunham. If not for the baffling observations of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepner, Newton might never have developed his methods. That being said, the contributions of Leibniz cannot be ignored. Leibniz developed his calculus while investigating a purely mathematical and metaphysical problem of tangents. It is possible that modern calculus could have arisen completely independently of scientific inquiry and observation. Differential and integral calculus have had an enormous impact on science since their discovery. Calculus is used in every branch of the physical sciences, actuarial science, computer science, statistics, engineering, economics, business, medicine, demography, and in other fields wherever a problem can be mathematically modeled and an optimal solution is desired. The applications of differential calculus to physics alone could fill several pages, but it is enough to say that all calculations of velocity, acceleration and time derivative rest solely on the foundation of differentials. Therefore, the entirety of rocketry and ballistics, for example, are completely dependent on differential calculus, as are all other arenas of classical mechanics. Applications of integral calculus arise whenever the problem is to compute a number that is approximately equal in principle to the sum of the solutions of many smaller problems. For example, if the pollution density along a river is known in relation to the position of

Mathematics and Science 6 measurement, then the integral of that density can be used to determine how much pollution there is in the whole length of the river. Another example of scientific observation driving mathematical discovery comes to us from economics. In the late 17th century an Italian mathematician named Jacob Bernoulli was examining the problem of compound interest. Bernoulli noticed that if interest is calculated more often throughout a year then more money would be owed. For example, if 100% interest is calculated for $1.00 at the end of a year then the debtor will owe $2.00. If interest is calculated once every six months then the debtor will owe $2.25. If the interest is calculated quarterly then the debtor will owe $2.44 (with additional remainders). Bernoulli also noticed that the amount of increase reaches a limit that we now call the force of interest. He calculated that, Using n as the number of compounding intervals, with interest of 1/n in each interval, the limit for large n is a constant. This number came to be known as e. Therefore, with continuous compounding, the account value will reach $2.71 (with remainders). More generally, an account that starts at $1, and yields (1+R) dollars at simple interest, will yield eR dollars with continuous compounding. This constant came to be known as Eulers constant, named after a later mathematician named Leonhard Euler who calculated it out to 18 digits. e was later introduced to calculus in order to perform integrals and differentials with exponential functions and logarithms such as those necessary in aviation, meteorology and astrophysics. Regardless of the later mathematical applications of the constant, it started out firmly rooted in the science of economics and came about as a solution to a specific observation. Based on these examples it might be tempting to write off Bochner and

Mathematics and Science 7 Dunhams assertions as baseless, but there are also numerous examples of purely mathematical discoveries with no starting foundation in scientific observation that lead inexorably to scientific progress. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics, is generally credited with doing the first groundbreaking work in what is now known as modular arithmetic. The discovery of Congruence Modulo is one of the foundations of number theory, touching on almost every aspect of its study, and provides key examples for group theory, ring theory and abstract algebra. It is sometimes called clock arithmetic because of its relationship to numbers that wrap around back to one another arithmetically. Though it began largely as an investigation into numerical relationships, which forms the predecessor of what is now called Number Theory, modular arithmetic has numerous and profound impacts in all arenas of science. In cryptography, for example, modular arithmetic directly underpins public key systems such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman, as well as providing finite fields which underlie elliptic curves, and is used in a variety of symmetric key algorithms including AES, IDEA, and RC4. In computer science, modular arithmetic is often applied in bitwise operations and other operations involving fixedwidth, cyclic data structures. What is interesting to note is that Gauss discovered congruence modulo in 1801, but it wasnt until the early 1900s that this concept saw practical application in the sciences. This correlates very closely to Dunhams 100 years assertion. One of the most powerful examples, if not the most powerful example, of mathematics driving scientific progress is the non-Euclidian geometry of Jnos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky. In classical Greece, a mathematician named Euclid wrote the

Mathematics and Science 8 seminal work of geometry: The Elements. For nearly 2000 years it stood as the single most important work in the field of geometry next to Archimedes Of the Sphere and the Cylinder. Examining the 5 postulates that form the necessary assumptions of Euclidian geometry in the early 19th century, Bolyai and Lobachevsky were both confounded by what they felt should be a proof rather than an axiom. Euclids Fifth Postulate, known as the Parallel Postulate, defines parallel lines as those that do not meet when taken to the infinite and was noted as being conspicuously more complex in nature than the other four postulates. Independently both Bolyai and Lobachevsky discovered that if geometric operations are performed without Euclids Fifth Postulate they continue to yield a thoroughly consistent geometry. Bolyai performed these operations on an elliptic while Lobachevsky performed them on a hyperbolus, but the results were the same and form the backbone of what is today studied as non-Euclidian geometry. Bolyais and Lobachevskys non-Euclidian geometries were used by Bernhard Riemann in the mid 19th century to form Riemannian geometry, which acts as Euclidian geometry in some instances and as non-Euclidian geometry in others. Riemanns work was groundbreaking for mathematics, but in the early 20th century it would be used by perhaps the most famous physicist of all time to describe peculiar properties of light and energy. In 1915, Albert Einstein published a paper on a geometric theory of gravity now known as General Relativity Theory. In it Einstein describes space as a generally flat plane excepting regions near where energy is present, whereupon space becomes elliptical. Since, according to an earlier theory of his called Special Relativity Theory, energy and mass are equivalent (i.e. matter is simply frozen energy), the appearance of masses such as planets forces space into an elliptical framework that distorts light and

Mathematics and Science 9 energy to form gravitation. This revolutionary theory unified special relativity and Newtonian mechanics and serves as the description of gravitation to this day. As if revolutionizing physics as we know it isnt enough, this wouldnt be the last time Riemanns mathematics would be used to revolutionize a field of science. In 1896, Riemann published a paper providing a functional equation hypothesizing a relationship between the distribution of zeroes and the emergence of prime numbers. This equation, known as the Riemann Zeta Function, is the backbone of the as-yet-unsolved Riemann hypothesis, which is widely considered the most important unsolved mathematical problem today. While the exact meaning of the Riemann hypothesis is esoteric to all but the most advanced mathematicians, its mathematical elegance is widely respected. In 1935, linguist George Kingsley Zipf proposed an empirical law of linguistics, now known as Zipfs Law, that accorded closely to Riemanns Zeta Function. Zipf's law states that given a body of natural language spoken words or text, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. In other words, the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, and so on. Zipfs Law has proven true for all known languages, and also has important implications for cryptography. It is obvious to any researcher that mathematical discovery and scientific progress go hand in hand. What is not so obvious is the nature of that relationship. In many cases scientific observations have demanded new mathematics. In these cases mathematics is not the instigator of change but the result. In other cases discoveries in mathematics predate practical scientific progress by as much as a century. For this reason it is clear that the relationship between mathematical discovery and scientific progress cannot be

Mathematics and Science 10 described as strictly causative. Instead, after analyzing several of the most important discoveries in mathematics and their application to other scientific disciplines, the data suggests that the relationship between mathematical discovery and scientific progress is merely correlative in accordance with the current paradigm of scientific and mathematical research.

Mathematics and Science 11 References Bochner, S. (1969). The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunham, W. (1990/1991). Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (Rev. Ed.). New York City: Penguin (Non-Classics). Hawking, S. (2007). God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History. Philadelphia: Running Press. Hawking, S. (2003). On the Shoulders of Giants. Philadelphia: Running Press. King, J. (2009). Mathematics in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Kuhn, T. (1962/1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pickover, C. A. (2008). Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them. New York City: Oxford University Publishing USA. Pickover, C. A. (2009). The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics. New York City: Sterling. Singh, S. et al (2006). The Science Book. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson Illustrated. Smith, K. (2006). The Nature of Mathematics (11th Ed.). Florence, KY: Brooks Cole. Trudeau, R. (1986). The Non-Euclidian Revolution. Boston: Birkhauser. Wigner, E. P. (1980). The Unreasonable Effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Comunications <sic> on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13, 1-14.