“Math? Why math?”
So asks many an undergraduate upon reading the syllabus of an introductory astronomy course. Schadenfreude aside, it’s actually not a bad question.
In 1959, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner took a run at the topic. Three centuries earlier, Galileo was characteristically eloquent when he said, “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.” Wigner didn’t disagree. “The mathematical language,” said Wigner, “has more to commend it than being the only language which we can speak; it shows that it is, in a very real sense, the correct language.”
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