What is mathematics about? That is not so easy to explain. With biology, say, we know where we are.
Even if we take the heroic (or foolhardy) Platonic option that they are inhabitants of an abstract world beyond space and time, which we access through a mysterious faculty of intuition, we are left with no understanding of what mathematics tells us about the actual world we live in.
So by default mathematics has often been considered as not about anything at all.
Neither of those views of mathematics is correct.
The easiest object of mathematics to appreciate is symmetry. ... palindromes have a perfect symmetry.
On the one hand, bilateral symmetry—the simple left-repeats-right symmetry of an isosceles triangle, a palindrome, or the human body—would seem to be so simple as to exhaust very quickly what could be said about it.
Still, it is amazing what can be said about very little.
... They [stereoisomers] are in one sense chemically the same, but living things can tell the difference. The difference in the smell of oranges and lemons is caused by right and left forms of limonene.
The book is not as successful on physics as on mathematics. That is not Gardner’s fault. It is the fault of physics. Physicists keep changing their story ...
... somewhere in obscure parts of the subatomic realm, the universe can “tell the difference” between left-handed and right-handed.
