ABSTRACT
With an invitation from Ronald Mickens in 1987, Yi Lin had the honor to join some of the very well-known scholars from around the globe, such as Wendell Holladay (Vanderbilt University), Saunders Mac Lane (University of Chicago), John Polkinghorne (Cambridge, UK), Robert Rosen (Dalhousie University, Canada), and others, to express his opinion from the angle of systems research on Nobel laureate Eugene P. Wigner’s assertion about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”:
The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. (Wigner, 1960)
His paper, entitled “A Few Systems-Colored Views of the World,” was eventually published in 1990 (Mickens, 1990). Continuing this train of thought, based on the observation that when faced with practical problems, new abstract mathematical theories are developed to investigate them, predictions made based on the newly developed theories are very “accurate.” In 1997, with Hu and Li, Yi Lin posted the following question: Does the human way of thinking have the same structure as that of the material world?
