A collective groan ripples around the classroom. Possibly one of the most universally hated subjects, just for its sheer sense of uselessness (why do I need to find x???) and the mind-numbingly dull sensation of Déjà vu that you get when yet another virtually identical quadratic equation appears on the page. Every wave of students has wondered- why would anyone create maths? But what if humans didn’t make maths up? What if mathematics was a self-proving, perfect system that exists whether we like it or not? The language to express it may be artificial, but mathematics itself is not made by us. Mathematics does not exist because it can be found empirically in the world; the world only exists because of fundamental mathematical and physical laws that we have observed, not invented.
To what extent is it possible to use scientific evidence from the world around us to develop new mathematical concepts?
How far can intuition be used in mathematical understanding and discovery?
thephoebeofknowledge 
And they’re interesting knowledge questions too, Phoebe. I get the second one but am a bit confused by the first. What are you thinking of particularly? If, as you say, Mathematics seems to provide the basis for the physical laws of the universe, how exactly could we turn this around so that scientific discoveries provide the basis of new mathematical concepts?
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I think I was trying to discuss how (if at all) relevant empiricism could be to mathematics, and whether scientific evidence could ever give rise to a different application or concept in mathematics, for example, velocity and displacement linking to calculus. I probably should have said ‘new applications of mathematics’ instead of new concepts, as science often requires mathematical concepts to be understood, but the subject itself does not help them to be discovered.
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