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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science
What isn't obvious is why make specific adjustments purely for the sake of revealing or discovering an unknown, unsuspected aspect in a mechanical model of how nature works. Who came up with that? How did they figure out that canceling could reveal surprises?
Well that's the academic discipline of mathematics in a nutshell - it's not just the algebraic technique of changing equations that we're talking about here, it's the general aim of coming up with mathematical hypotheses and trying to prove or disprove them. It's solving puzzles, basically, and it's a creative process that uses insight, hunches, assumptions as much as anything else. The Greeks used geometry as their primary method. The Persians algebra. But it's all the same process, just different means of representation.
There's nothing here!