E32: 'Mathematics is the most perfect language of all'. Discuss.

Strictly speaking, a language is a verbalized means of communication, enabling the speaker to convey thought to another person. However, the more complex the thoughts or ideas, the harder or more cumbersome the language becomes. To explain verbally why 'the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides' would require a long and tedious paragraph. And this is the simplest possible example; anything more complicated would be unmanageable. So in this way mathematical symbols which nowadays are universally accepted, compress information in a way that no other language possibly could, and this fact supports the topic statement.

However, this language is only available to most people in its simplest forms, i.e. arithmetic, algebra and geometry, and these are taught in schools because they have everyday usages. The shop assistant needs arithmetic, unless there is an automatic cash till, and technicians of all kinds need the other two; perhaps more, such as trigonometry, logarithms and the calculus, should he or she be dealing with quantities that vary in time and space. In this sense, of course, mathematics is a minority language, a language intelligible only to the specialists of all nations.

The time may come when knowledge of higher mathematics is far more widespread, however. The new mathematics is now being taught in many schools, sometimes alongside the traditional approach, and younger students find the new methods more intelligible. The principles of course have not changed; merely the setting out. However, there are great developments available to younger students enabling them to see the subject as a whole rather than as a series of separate compartments, and this should engender more interest in those whose natural bent is in the direction of the arts. Read the whole essay
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