The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

By J. Hoffman, Claes Johnson, Anders Logg. 2004

881 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Philosophy

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Peter Bhlmann
2. M. J. van der Laan
3. Petros Drineas
4. Michael J. Kane
5. A. Goldhaber
6. Michael Martin Nieto

In Philosophy

1. Steven Basart
2. Dawn Song
3. Saurav Kadavath
4. Akul Arora
5. Eric Tang
6. Dan Hendrycks
7. A. Goldhaber
8. Jacob Steinhardt

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset (2021, background): “This has even led some to describe mathematics as being “unreasonably effective” (Wigner, 1960).”
• The Surprising Mathematics of Longest Increasing Subsequences (2015, background): “Wigner [146] (and later Hamming [55] and others) once famously described as the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics.”
• The unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in economics (2005, background): “Eugene Wigner's Richard Courant Lecture in the Mathematical Sciences, delivered at New York University on May 11, 1959, was titled, picturesquely and, perhaps, with intentional impishness The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, (Wigner, 1960).”
• Handbook of Big Data (2016, methodology): “…the AN in three sections: (1) In this introductory section, we give some background about the data analytic and statistical problem addressed by this tool; (2) in Section 6.3, we describe the graphical displays used by the tool; and (3) in Section 6.4, we describe the actual operation of the tool.”
• The Unreasonable Fairness of Maximum Nash Welfare (2016, neutral): “Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate the “unreasonable effectiveness” [Wigner 1960] — or unreasonable fairness, if you will — of the maximum Nash welfare (MNW) solution, even when the goods are indivisible.”
• Photon and graviton mass limits (2008, background): “Wigner wrote a famous article about the seemingly miraculous effectiveness of mathematics in science (173).”
• Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions (2014, background): “Speakers generate speech by needing to communicate a meaning in a given world or social context; their utterances obey much more complex systems of syntactic, lexical, and semantic regularity.”
• Improving tourism destination governance: a complexity science approach (2010, background): “different systems or between systems’ structures (Gentner, 2002; Krieger, 2005; Wigner, 1960).”