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people seem to ask this question a lot and honestly i’ve never really understood it. when you play tic-tac-toe you learn that perfect play is a draw. that’s a mathematical fact you can prove. does it “come from” somewhere? i dunno! what does that mean?
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
Where does math come from anyway? The harmonic series is to music notation as ???? math
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if someone thinks they understand what the question is asking i’d really genuinely appreciate it, iirc it crops up all the time, alongside “is math discovered or invented” (short answer: people invent rules to games and then discover good and bad strategies for those games)
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people are asking if the universe is made of math or not, or if maybe there's a seperate, transcendt world where math is. That's really it. It's ontological. It might also have something to do with a desire to know what rules genuinely underly mathematics
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