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We've been wrong about math for 2300 years


A radical conceptualist take on the foundations of mathematics

While the book is certainly not perfect (and not everyone agrees with all of it), the overwhelmingly positive feedback (from Abel Prize winners and Fields medallists to high school teachers and students) is a strong indicator of the presence of this consensus. This messy situation has fostered a variety of interpretations, all coming with their own specific blindspots — from Descartes’ dualism to Galileo’s take that “math is language of the universe”, from Frege’s logicism to Brouwer’s intuitionism, from Hilbert’s formalism to Ramanujan’s mysticism. If you agree with me on the specifics of what “doing math” actually entails, you may start to notice the elephant in the room: while we were stuck in the pointless Platonism vs formalism debate, we failed to communicate that active imagination was an essential step of mathematical comprehension.

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