A Complex Problem For Formalists.

The Formalist conception of mathematics, which the physicist Eugene Wigner in “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” de- fended, and eventually became the dominant philosophy of mathematics among the 20th century physicists has many shortcomings. It is this formalism that creates the miracle of the applicability of mathematics in modern physics and turns the relationship between mathematics and physics into a happy accident for which we don’t have a “rational explanation”. Through a historical reflec- tion on complex numbers, their origin and development, I aim to show that this formalism does not hold up to scrutiny.

Authors

• Arezoo Islami

Keywords

• Formalism
• Unreasonable Effectiveness
• Applicability of Mathematics
• Complex Numbers