Did anyone see the article in the Daily Telegraph which is on their website
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6439621/How-maths-makes-the-world-go-round.html ?

It really annoyed me because of a myth that seems to be perpetuated. The article was praising a new book by Ian Stewart who for many years contributed to Scientific American when Martin Gardner gave up his wonderful "Mathematical Games" slot. I have not read the book yet, but a title " How maths makes the world go round" is indeed very worrying. The sub-title " Whether you’re searching for oil, the lost chord or a better kind of carrot, mathematics is the key, says Ian Stewart" is irrefutable, but the article in the Telegraph gave the impression that first God created mathematics and then the of his world conformed to this formalism. People already have problems with mathematics and its teaching which such a thesis would do nothing to dispel. When I taught mathematics I reminded students of the apocryphal story that the dictionary of Inuit has hundreds of words to describe the quality of snow, but only a few to describe the quality of vegetation. This was because that language needed to express concepts to the Inuit people which are important for them, but are not necessarily important to someone living in the UK. We talk about being able to express thoughts in one language which cannot be easily expressed in another. Gemütlich is a single word which expresses something in German that requires multiple words in English. So, armed with these thoughts I explained to students that mathematics is merely a language which has its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. It is a very useful language because the shorthand 'sine' and 'cosine' are used to save someone doing a lot of out-of-phase hand-waving. When students absorbed this concept, then the learning of mathematics suddenly lost its mystique. So, to Professor Stewart and the Daily Telegraph I would have to say that the wonderful world in which we live is amenable to the mathematics that we have developed, just as it is amenable to description in any other language. Where we observe something that is outside current formalism, then we have to develop new mathematics. The journalist who wrote the Daily Telegraph article talks about Fourier analysis. Today most students on mathematical science courses will learn about this at an early stage and yet, in 1857, when people were uncertain about the feasibility of laying an Atlantic telegraph cable, there was mention that Professor Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) of Glasgow University "was one of the few people in Britain who understood the new techniques of Monsieur Fourier". If we come closer to our own time and look at the efforts which Oliver Heaviside had to go through to derive some of his ground-breaking results we can be awe-struck by the tenacity of the man. Today, armed with a mathematical curiosity which is entirely imaginary (the square-root of minus one), science and engineering students can easily deliver the same results. The world is wonderful. Mathematics is wonderful, but let us please not perpetuate a myth which makes the situation even more opaque for so many.