Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Effectiveness of Mathematics (20 Sep 2004) While working on The Humane Interface (Addison-Wesley, 2000), I found it necessary to try to understand why we had certain mental abilities and not others. Plausible hypotheses arose not from cognitive psychology, as I had expected, but from the biology of evolution. The present question, the fit of “our” mathematics to the external world has generally been approached as a question of philosophy and physics. But considering that understanding of the physical world in terms of mathematics is a human trait, and that humans are biological creatures, I should not have been surprised that biology, and indeed one of the most powerful theories of biology, the evolution of species, should provide a measure of understanding. Article URL: http://humane.sourceforge.net/unpublished/effectiveness_mathematics.html Read 100 more articles from HP Labs sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Environmental Storytelling Part III: Lessons Learned in the Virtual World     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy