This is a quick one. I came across a quote in a book about the discovery of calculus – a mathematical technique which unlocked to us many of the natural world’s secret workings and was central to the creation of our modern technologies.

But the quote was not a mathematical one. It’s about something even more foundational, even more basic, which we take for granted every day:

“It’s eerie that calculus can mimic nature so well, given how different the two domains are. Calculus is an imaginary realm of symbols and logic; nature is an actual realm of forces and phenomena. Yet somehow, if the translation from reality into symbols is done artfully enough, the logic of calculus can use one real-world truth to generate another. Truth in, truth out. Start with something that is empirically true and symbolically formulated (as Maxwell did with the laws of electricity and magnetism), apply the right logical manipulations, and out comes another empirical truth, possibly a new one, a fact about the universe that nobody knew before (like the existence of electromagnetic waves). In this way, calculus lets us peer into the future and predict the unknown. That’s what makes it such a powerful tool for science and technology. But why should the universe respect the workings of any kind of logic, let alone the kind of logic that we puny humans can muster? This is what Einstein marveled at when he wrote, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” And it’s what Eugene Wigner meant in his essay “On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” when he wrote, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.””

Infinite Powers: The Story of Calculus – The Language of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Here’s what I thought of as I read it. I thought of another quote from the Biblical book ‘Proverbs’, which was written long before we had understanding of calculus or many other modern mathematical methods. Proverbs chapter 8 is an extended metaphor, in which ‘wisdom’ is personified as a woman who calls out and invites people to learn her ways. In one section, ‘wisdom’ describes ‘her’ involvement in the way the universe was ordered:

“The LORD created me as the beginning of his works, before his deeds of long ago. From eternity I was appointed, from the beginning, from before the world existed. When there were no deep oceans I was born, when there were no springs overflowing with water; before the mountains were set in place – before the hills – I was born, before he made the earth and its fields, or the beginning of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he marked out the horizon over the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when the fountains of the deep grew strong, when he gave the sea his decree that the waters should not pass over his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as a master craftsman, and I was his delight day by day, rejoicing before him at all times, rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth, and delighting in its people.”

Proverbs 8:22-31 NET

No wonder the universe follows has so many wondrous patterns and ‘laws’. No wonder that we can discover, combine, and use mathematical models of these laws with startling accuracy. And no wonder that despite this there is so much more we still don’t understand…

The ‘laws of nature’ are unreasonably reasonable; but this is exactly what we would expect if the foundation of it all is the infinite wisdom of an infinite mind.