We live in a universe of patterns. (pg.

1)

Every night the stars move in circles across the sky. The seasons cycle at yearly intervals. No two
snowflakes are ever exactly the same, but they all have sixfold symmetry

Human mind and culture have developed a formal system of thought for recognizing, classifying, and
exploiting patterns. We call it mathematics. By using mathematics to organize and systematize our ideas
about patterns, we have discovered a great secret: nature's patterns are not just there to be admired,
they are vital clues to the rules that govern natural processes.

The regular nightly motion of the stars is also a clue, this time to the fact that the Earth rotates. Waves
and dunes are clues to the rules that govern the flow of water, sand, and air. The tiger's stripes and the
hyena's spots attest to mathematical regularities in biological growth and form. Rainbows tell us about
the scattering of light, and indirectly confirm that raindrops are spheres. Lunar haloes are clues to the
shape of ice crystals.

There is much beauty in nature's clues, and we can all recognize it without any mathematical training.

Patterns possess utility as well as beauty. O

We are still learning to recognize new kinds of pattern. Only within the last thirty years has humanity
become explicitly aware of the two types of pattern now known as fractals and chaos. Pg 3

The simplest mathematical objects are numbers, and the simplest of nature's patterns are numerical.
The phases of the moon make a complete cycle from new moon to full moon and back again every
twenty-eight days. The year is three hundred and sixty-five days long-roughly. People have two 4
NATURE'S NUMBERS legs, cats have four, insects have six, and spiders have eight. Starfish have five arms

Clover normally has three leaves: the superstition that a four-leaf clover is lucky reflects a deepseated
belief that exceptions to patterns are special.

Numerology is the easiest-and consequently the most dangerous-method for finding patterns.

The difficulty lies in distinguishing significant numerical patterns from accidental ones. Here's a case in
point. Kepler was fascinated with mathematical patterns in nature, and he devoted much of his life to
looking for them in the behavior of the planets. He devised a simple and tidy theory for the existence of
precisely six planets (in his time only Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were known). He
also discovered a very strange pattern relating the orbital period of a THE NATURAL ORDER S planet-the
time it takes to go once around the Sun-to its distance from the Sun.
For a start, it must be wrong, because we now know of nine planets, not six. There could be even more,
farther out from the Sun, We think that the Solar System condensed from a cloud of gas surrounding the
Sun, and the number of planets presumably depended on the amount of matter in the gas cloud, how it
was distributed, and how fast and in what directions it was moving. An equally plausible gas cloud could
have given us eight planets, or eleven; the number is accidental, depending on the initial conditions of
the gas cloud, rather than universal, reflecting a general law of nature.

triangles, squares, pen- THE NATURAL ORDER 7 tagons, hexagons, circles, ellipses, spirals, cubes,
spheres, cones, and so on. All of these shapes can be found in nature, The rainbow, for example, is a
collection of circles, one for each color. We don't normally see the entire circle, just an arc; but rainbows
seen from the air can be complete circles. You also see circles in the ripples on a pond, in the the human
eye, and on butterflies' wings.

There are waves of many different kinds-surging toward a beach in parallel ranks, spreading in a V-shape
behind a moving boat, radiating outward from an underwater earthquake.

There are similar patterns in the atmosphere, too, the most dramatic being the vast spiral of a hurricane
as seen by an orbiting astronaut.

Nature's love of stripes and spots extends into the animal kingdom, with tigers and leopards, zebras and
giraffes. The shapes and patterns of animals and plants are a happy hunting ground for the
mathematically minded. Why, for example, do so many shells form spirals? Why are starfish equipped
with a symmetric set of arms? Why do many viruses assume regular geometric shapes, the most striking
being that of an icosahedron-a regular solid formed from twenty equilateral triangles? Why are so many
animals bilaterally symmetric? Why is that symmetry so often imperfect, disappearing when you look at
the detail, such as the position of the human heart or the differences between the two hemispheres of
the human brain? Why are most of us right-handed, but not all of us? In addition to patterns of form,
there are patterns of movement. In the human walk, the feet strike the ground in a regular rhythm: left-
right-Ieft-right-Ieft-right. When a four-legged creature-a horse, say-walks, there is a more complex but
equally rhythmic pattern. This prevalence of pattern in locomotion extends to the scuttling of insects,
the flight of birds, the pulsations of jellyfish, and the wavelike movements of fish, worms, and snakes.
The sidewinder, a desert snake

You do not see spherical clouds, or cubical clouds, or icosahedral clouds. Clouds are wispy, formless,
fuzzy clumps. Yet there is a very distinctive pattern to clouds, a kind of symmetry, which is closely
related to the physics of cloud formation.

CHAPTER 2

We've now established the uncontroversial idea that nature is full of patterns.
If the pattern had been an obvious feature of distances, we would have pinned motion down a lot
earlier in our history.

Everything would be wonderful if you could just use an interval of zero, but unfortunately that won't
work, because both the distance WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 17 traveled and the time elapsed will be
zero, and a rate of change of DID is meaningless.

The story of calculus brings out two of the main things that mathematics is for: providing tools that let
scientists calculate what nature is doing, and providing new questions for mathematicians to sort out to
their own satisfaction. These are the external and internal aspects of mathematics, often referred to as
applied and pure mathematics (I dislike both adjectives, and I dislike the implied separation even more).
It might appear in this case that the physicists set the agenda: if the methods of calculus seem to be
working, what does it matter why they work? You will hear the same sentiments expressed

So for about two hundred years, humanity was in a very curious position as regards the calculus. The
physicists were using it, with great success, to understand nature and to predict the way nature
behaves; the mathematicians were worrying about what it really meant and how best to set it up so that
it worked as a sound mathematical theory; and the philosophers were arguing that it was all nonsense.
Everything got resolved eventually, but you can still find strong differences in attitude.

One of the strangest features of the relationship between mathematics and the "real world," but also
one of the strongest, is that good mathematics, whatever its source, eventually turns out to be useful.
There are all sorts of theories why this should be so, ranging from the structure of the human mind to
the idea that the universe is somehow built from little bits of mathematics. My feeling is that the answer
is probably quite simple: mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every
pattern that there is. I admit that I find it much harder to offer a convincing reason for nature to behave
in this manner. Maybe the question is back to front: maybe the point is that creatures WHAT
MATHEMATiCS is FOR 19 able to ask that kind of question can evolve only in a universe with that kind of
structure .• Whatever the reasons, mathematics definitely is a useful way to think about nature. What
do we want it to tell us about the patterns we observe? There are many answers. We want to
understand how they happen; to understand why they happen, which is different; to organize the
underlying patterns and regularities in the most satisfying way; to predict how nature will behave; to
control nature for our own ends; and to make practical use of what we have learned about our world.
Mathematics helps us to do all these things, and often it is indispensable.

Here mathematics lets us do the molecular bookkeeping that makes sense of the different chemical
reactions that go on; it describes the atomic structure of the molecules used in shells, it describes the
strength and rigidity of shell material as compared to the weakness and pliability of the snail's body, and
so on. Indeed, without mathematics we would never have convinced ourselves that matter really is
made from atoms, or have worked out how the atoms are arranged.
The question of why snails have spiral shells has a very different character

We can use mathematics to relate the resulting geometry to all the different variables-such as growth
rate and eccentricity of growth-that are involved.

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