Mathematics is a Godly pursuit

I had this thought after tutoring one day and I've been meaning to write on it for a while.  Many friends and family of mine will be familiar with my love for mathematics and my feelings of anathema toward the apparently acceptable innumeracy of current American culture at large.  While there are numerous arguments on the basis of how useful mathematics is, what a powerful tool it is and how important it is to understand statistics (such as opinion polls or study results) there is another argument to be made.  Like we appreciate art, literature, and other humanities for their inherent beauty and the way they open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world, so should we appreciate mathematics similarly.

Mathematics teaches us (or can if taught and learned with aplomb) humility.  The superior attitude of some of those capable with numbers may seem to contradict this, but this may emulate from the sad way in which mathematics is taught.  An excellent author about mathematics in culture, John Allen Paulos, has often pointed out that math is taught and subsequently perceived as being about computation.  He says that this is similar to saying writing is about typing, and reminds me of a professor of mine saying, "To say computer science is about computers is like saying astronomy is about telescopes."  I will endeavor to avoid further digression about mathematics education, but will point out that when we tell people that they can find a certain answer following a couple basic steps we should not be surprised when they come to believe that they understand everything.

Mathematics is a harsh mistress.  When not teaching algorithms and their application (not a study of algorithms, which is rather enlightening, but instead essentially programming students in a manner shockingly similar to the way a programmer programs a computer to do specific computations), mathematics is about logic.  For the few reading that have actually done proofs, I feel this is a core of mathematics.  Working through with rigor new knowledge and insights from a handful of basic, known, accepted axioms.

What I learned taking a basic concepts of mathematics class (which with a name like that you may be surprised to learn was a junior level college course) is that this process is unforgiving.  One must be utterly cautious and unrelentingly precise.  One must avoid at all costs projecting one's desires, feelings, and possibly even intuition onto their work.  Instead one must choose to strictly follow what is known and established, to do what the axioms and previously derived theorems allow, and nothing more, and to consider every case and possibility

It is this, that makes me say mathematics is a Godly pursuit.  When I say mathematics is godly I mean that it is greater than ourselves.  We must be willing to practice humility and recognize laws that are beyond our instincts, hearts, and preconceptions.  The laws of mathematics do not bend to our desires because we feel they should.  Mathematics isn't a vehicle for our own ideas or agendas, but rather a manner in which we examine how we came to these and whether or not they require additional scrutiny.  Mathematics brings us to truth that we discover for ourselves but are independent form who we are.  Mathematics is bringing something beyond us and greater than us into ourselves.  This is what religion (like mathematics, when it isn't perverted into a degenerate form that is only good for frustrating students or wrongly justifying our preconceptions) does for us as well.

I will end repeating the refrain that mathematics teaches us humility, and this is what makes it at least nigh on divine.  To learn and to do mathematics is to seek knowledge and learn how little we know, what the limits are to our knowledge, and how easily we can err.  Is not such a pursuit godly?