The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

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"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" was the title of the 1959 Richard Courant Lecture in Mathematical Sciences, delivered at New York University by the physicist Eugene Wigner, and published in Communication in Pure and Applied Mathematics in 1960. In it, Wigner observes that pure mathematical concepts that have been developed and studied independently of physics, often so mathematicians can show their “ingenuity and sense of formal beauty”, nevertheless often find applications in physics. The mathematical structure of theoretical physics often points the way to further advances in that theory and has empirical predictive power in describing nature. Albert Einstein and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had previously thought that the success of abstract mathematics in physical science was a mystery that required explanation, but Wigner's lecture became the classic statement of the problem.

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