Philosophy of Math Scholarship Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Philosophy of Math - Scholarship Essay Example This question turned out to be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since" (Clay Mathematics Institute, 2008). Ornes (2006) finds a way to simply, yet humorously, define the conjecture by saying, "Say you're walking down a street, and you encounter a strange and complicated shape whose surface sports peaks and valleys, mountains and molehills, but no holes. If you were a mathematician, you may want to study the way that functions behave on it. Poincar's conjecture says that no matter what it looks like, it's a sphere. The conjecture gives mathematicians a short and easy way to identify a deformed blob as a sphere in disguise." (2) Read the article by Colyvan on indispensability of math. You will find it at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathphil-indis/ . Describe the "indispensability argument" and briefly discuss one objection (ie, state an objection and say why you think it a good one or a poor one.) According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008, pg.