Dr Paul Allen

In his famous essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner wrote that the correspondence between pure mathematics and the natural world was “something bordering on the mysterious.” “There is,” he said “no rational explanation for it.” It makes sense to say that basic mathematics was developed to describe things in the everyday world. We can understand the origin of things like counting and addition and how to calculate area. However, as Wigner goes on to argue, this simple explanation fails to account for so much of what we see. The work of professional mathematicians often involves incredible ingenuity and extraordinary feats of logic. Some theorems and proofs take years to work out. And yet, astonishingly, many of the most brilliant and insanely abstract concepts turn out to model real-world phenomena perfectly. They fit like a lock and key. Consider for a moment just how extraordinary thi