Knowledge in Numbers

Abstract

Using our ability to differentiate became one of our great passions. By using word tools, we began to differentiate or interrupt the continuum of being into discrete units. We dissected our world into blocks and then attempted to put the blocks back together again. The inclination to analyze, synthesize, to interrupt the continuum, is so pronounced that we might term it an innate human property. We see small children dissecting their new toys, sometimes with disastrous consequences, attempting to reduce them to the smallest possible units and then rebuilding them so that the parts at least resemble the original wholes.

Most remarkable among archaeoastronomy’s revelations is the universality of this intellectual awakening in mankind. Both interest in the sky and skills in astronomy seem to have developed independently and naturally on different continents in different eras among peoples as unrelated in time and character as the builders of Stonehenge and the cliff dwellers of the American Southwest. Some attempts at astronomy dead-ended, others flowered into sophisticated cosmologies, and still others borrowed concepts and techniques from contemporary cultures. But all seem intended as a response to the human desire to fix man’s place in the universe, to control the vast and frightening environment by understanding it. [12:pp. 11–12]

James Cornell, 1981

A sense of strong personal aesthetic delight derives from the phenomenon that can be termed order out of chaos. To some extent the whole object of mathematics is to create order where previously chaos seemed to reign, to extract structure and in- variance from the midst of disarray and turmoil. [13:p. 172]

Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, 1981