ERC Advanced Grant · 2024
The Mathematization of Nature: The Origin of Mathematical Physics in Plato and Early Pythagoreanism
‘The Book of Nature is written in geometrical characters’, wrote Galileo in 1623. The view that mathematics provides the language of nature has been an axiom of physics since Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Behind the founders of modern science stood, by their own admission, ‘our genuine masters, Plato and Pythagoras’ (Kepler 1597). But how did the early Pythagoreans and Plato conceive of and justify their mathematical world view? MatNat investigates the question of the historical origin of the mathematization of nature from the point of view of a deep conceptual puzzle: How can necessary mathematical truths concerning unchanging abstract entities explain the contingent, variable and…
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