Stuart Kauffman - Why the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of Mathematics?

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What is it about mathematics that mathematicians employ the language of philosophy to speak about “truth” and the language of art to speak about “beauty”? What makes mathematical propositions true? What makes them beautiful. Conversely, can mathematical propositions be true without being beautiful and/or be beautiful without being true?

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco in 1968. After completing his residency in Emergency Medicine, he moved into developmental genetics of the fruitfly, holding appointments first at the University of Chicago, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1995, where he rose to Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. Kauffman held a MacArthur Fellowship, 1987–1992.

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