Unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics


The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics is a phrase that alludes to the article by physicist Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences". This phrase is meant to suggest that mathematical analysis has not proved as valuable in other fields as it has in physics.

Life sciences

, a mathematician who worked in biomathematics and molecular biology, as well as many other fields in applied mathematics, is quoted as stating,
An opposing view is given by Leonard Adleman, a theoretical computer scientist who pioneered the field of DNA computing. In Adleman's view, "Sciences reach a point where they become mathematized," starting at the fringes but eventually "the central issues in the field become sufficiently understood that they can be thought about mathematically. It occurred in physics about the time of the Renaissance; it began in chemistry after John Dalton developed atomic theory" and by the 1990s was taking place in biology. By the early 1990s, "Biology was no longer the science of things that smelled funny in refrigerators. The field was undergoing a revolution and was rapidly acquiring the depth and power previously associated exclusively with the physical sciences. Biology was now the study of information stored in DNA - strings of four letters: A, T, G, and C..and the transformations that information undergoes in the cell. There was mathematics here!"

Economics and finance

wrote of The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in economics. To him "the headlong rush with which economists have equipped themselves with a half-baked knowledge of mathematical traditions has led to an un-natural mathematical economics and a non-numerical economic theory." His argument is built on the claim that
Sergio M. Focardi and Frank J. Fabozzi, on the other hand, have acknowledged that "economic science is generally considered less viable than the physical sciences" and that "sophisticated mathematical models of the economy have been developed but their accuracy is questionable to the point that the 2007–08 economic crisis is often blamed on an unwarranted faith in faulty mathematical models" . They nevertheless claim that

Cognitive sciences

Roberto Poli of McGill University delivered a number of lectures entitled The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in cognitive sciences in 1999. The abstract is: