Numbers are linked to calculations. We are taught at several levels to do calculations with numbers. Calculation is something that is geared to get the right answers. This is why perhaps, mathematics and numbers are associated with the drills of multiplication tables, the drudgery of division, rote memorization of formulae etc. Is that all that we can do with numbers? Numbers can be about ideating. Perhaps, ideating is the primary tasks of numbers. If we begin to look at numbers this way , mathematics will begin to become different for us. Numbers can give us ideas about perfection of numbers, the nature of space and geometry , spontaneous formation of patterns , origin of randomness, infinity and our universe. We can enjoy these ideas without becoming computational whizards.
Our universe is written in the alphabets of numbers. It was Pythagoras who had this insight first. The mystery of the universe is that is explained by numbers. Galileo told us that the book of creation or the book God’s work was written in the alphabets of numbers, circles, triangles and squares. Copernicus accepted the apriorism of numbers to propose his helio-centric universe. Numbers and their relations somehow enables us to decode our universe. It is amazing that our artful and creative universe obeys rules of numbers. It is almost a truism that numbers run our universe. They have fine-tunned the universe. It is these numbers that made this universe and intelligent life possible. Numbers created universe. This belief may have led Johanes Kepler to imagine God as a greatest Geometer. Understanding our universe requires us to read the letters of number. Without these alphabets our universe is a terra incognita.
Reading the numerical alphabets of the universe , can enable us to create several mathematical universes. We can imagine several universes or multiverses that respond to several other numbers and their relations. We can in fact come back home an appreciate the universe that we inhabit as one that is like winning lottery for life. The numbers align in this universe exactly well to give us intelligent life. This means it is these numbers that let the universe become conscious of itself. It is we humans who as intelligent being created the mathematics that makes the universe legible. The alternate mathematical ways of imagining other universes brings us back to profoundly understand and appreciate the one that we live in. It can produce a new Eureka moment for us. Mathematics is indeed the language of our universe.
Mathematics or numbers and their relations inform the essential qualities of randomness, symmetry and beauty. The self-arising phenomena or emergence, the fractal patterns, stripes of zebra , ‘ herd intelligence’ in ants can all be illumined by the alphabets of numbers. These spontaneous generation of complexities might have been behind the emergence of life and even the leap of the chimpanzee to humans when the genetic distance is so negligible between the two. Religion and even Science has explained these issues of creation/ genesis profoundly. Numbers and their relations are also revealing us the answers to the Big Questions of humanity . Numbers and their play make us all and everything that we have in our known as well as unknown universe.
