Is mathematics mostly chaos or mostly order?

I rather think the discovered/invented thing is just semantics.

You can say that literally anything was "just discovered".

Thriller by Michael Jackson? Those particular ordering of sound waves always theoretically existed, MJ and various sound engineers just discovered them, they didn't create anything.

The cappucino? It's just a particular orderly collection of chemicals, such a collection always theoretically existed. Those baristas are explorers, discovering new latte art shapes, nothing creative there.

Cantor's diagonal argument? Yep, those numbers where just waiting to be discovered and written in that order.

And so on. The entire argument is meaningless, pointless philosophizing. Nobody wastes their time saying latte art was discovered rather than invented, but somehow when it comes to mathematics this is considered a deep and worthy discussion.

To me, the difference is: the way to __make__ music was invented, it was already there to be discovered.

Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way.

> Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way.

To me, it doesn't sound like you did. The parent comment of yours just stated, albeit bluntly, that the "invention" and "discovery" are fundamentally the same. Whether we use one or the other depends on how big the size of the space of the possibilities feels to us. Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".

When you invent a way to make music, did you really invent it? Or did you simply discover a particular configuration of atoms that can produce sound when handled in a particular way, that was already there in some platonic universe of ideals? Either way, the end result is the same. Nothing really changes.

Is TRIZ (and its great-great-grandchildren, LLM GenAI) invention, or discovery? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ

> Math has a very rigid and easily enumerable space of possibilities (strings of symbols), so we call it "discovery", while cooking has an enormous space of possibilities (countless pieces of meat and vegetables, each unique in its configuration of atoms, etc.), so we call it "invention".

I think you've made a good point here.

Although, to nitpick a bit: Both spaces (cooking and maths) are infinite, and for most fields of math, uncountably infinite. The difference is in the numbers we are dealing with. For cooking, it's mixtures of trillions of molecules. For maths, it's usually in the order of thousands of symbols (although those ellipses do some infinitely heavy lifting!).

> Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way

Not at all, you sparked thought in an area I find fascinating (philosophy of maths). Albeit I find this specific topic a bit too commonly discussed relative to how important it is, but I'm still happy to talk about it and share my thoughts.