Math: Invented or Discovered?

                                                          Math: Invented or Discovered




In school, math is the only subject that we "know" is solid. History has some stable ground but is a little shaky because we cant always know exactly what happened, how it happened, and how it happened. English is very opinion based because most of the time, our learning is based on ideas and personal analysis of something. Science, is closer to being solid but it is much harder because there are so many things that we don't know or haven't proven yet. But mathematics was always there, it was our rock. A lot of us clung to it because we knew we could rely and count (hehe) on math to always be there and never change. I don't know about others, but up until this past year, i thought math had always been there, i never really thought about it so i never really went deep into the roots of math and digested its true meaning.
Calculations and counting, as far as we know or have gone into it, have existed since basically us humans were conscious of ourselves. At first it was only a 0 and not 0 scale. Either we had something or we didn't, but that still remains within the confines of math doesn't it?
As humans evolved, our thoughts became more complex and we started developing more and more thoughts and ideas about the world that we lived in. One of the main ideas was mathematics. Whether it was divided up food in equal amounts or calculating how many times we had to stab an animal to kill it to even how many mates we could share as a tribe, we looked for and in turn created ways to make these things easier. This is the birth of equations, yes, equations are man made. Every single equation that you have ever used in math class has been man made, created by us and for us. This, obviously, seems like it is my answer to the question on whether math was Invented or Created by us. In my opinion, i believe that equations that we use in math were created by humans. But the idea behind it was not created by us. The idea behind it was already there before we were. For example, a quadratic formula: (ax² + bx + c = 0) is what i call an artistic representation and explanation of a natural motion. This equation forms a parabola, something that existed before we did and will always exist. It's not like we created a parabola and before us there was no parabola or "parabolaness", it just was not defined. We created this equation to help us define and show how it works in the real world. Parabolas were not created, they were discovered; the quadratic formula was created, not discovered, for the sake of explaining the parabola.
This same idea follows for the rest of the equations in math, they were created by us to help us explain something that we discovered. And what is interesting about it is that, while we have our own formulas explaining our things, there is probably an intelligent, or not so intelligent, life form in outer space that also has an equation to explain something that is complete different than ours. The result is always the same as ours, but their way of doing, their general procedure might be completely different from ours. Whether its harder, easier, longer, shorter, or about the same, it is very possible that they created something different to explain what the discovered.
These natural occurrences were always here, but with the use of human creativity and intelligence, we CREATED our own personal and standard way of explaining everything to one another.