The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics: from Hamming to Wigner and back again

This paper is a response to an old paper by \textit{R. W. Hamming} [Am. Math. Mon. 87, 81--90 (1980; Zbl 1495.00057)], which in turn deals with Wigner's famous remarks on the ``unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics [\textit{E. P. Wigner}, Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 13, 1--14 (1960; Zbl 0102.00703)]. It is not clear why the paper is called ``From Hamming to Wigner and back again rather than the other way around. In any case, the paper's main claim is that Hamming did not in fact address Wigner's problem in his paper, because Hamming and Wigner had different underlying concepts of physics as a scientific discipline. Wigner viewed physics as an inductive, empirical science; the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics then lies in the fact that (often recondite) mathematics can be used to cast empirical regularities into laws. Hamming has a deductive, a priori view of physics; the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics then lies in the fact that predictions about the behavior of the physical world can be made through mathematical deduction.

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