“Is God A Mathematician?” by Mario Livio (2024)

Review

After hearing about Eugene Wigner’s article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” for many years, I recently decided to read and digest the article for myself. (If you’re so inclined, you can read about the results here.) Continuing this exploration of the philosophy of mathematics led me to Mario Livio’s intriguing book, Is God a Mathematician?, selected by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 2009. Here, I present a summary of that book. My research on this book in turn led me to Livio’s Scientific American article, “Why Math Works,” an interview with Krista Tippett, and a Nova special that features him prominently. I encourage you to explore these sources as well as the book itself.

Livio does not intend the title as a theological question. He is instead referring to two questions concerning the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics in the physical world.

The first question is “Does mathematics have an existence independent of the human mind?” or put another way, is mathematics discovered, extant in an abstract realm, independent of the world we perceive with our senses, or is it an invention, that is, a creation by the human mind? Those who belong to the “discovered” camp are known as “Platonists,” and include (or have included) such notables as G. H. Hardy, Roger Pendrose, Kurt Gödel, and Martin Gardner. On the “formalist” side of the argument lies Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, Georg…