In our time, many students would prefer to begin an education, or even an inquiry, with mathematics and mathematical representations, and there are good reasons for this. The problems that can be posed and answered by mathematical methods range from elementary calculation and geometry to higher algebra, group theory, and probability and statistics, and these have very wide application across almost every domain. Nor is there any doubt of the power of mathematics to express quantity, structure, and other formal considerations, either in themselves, as in pure mathematics, or as they are found in real things.
Mathematics, therefore, is a powerful and even essential tool for understanding the world, not only at the level of practical engineering but at the level of the most fundamental truths about nature, time, and motion. In the late thirteenth century, Roger Bacon said that the gateway and the key to the study of nature is mathematics; this follows Aristotle himself, who had said that quantity is the first property of material substance; and this has come increasingly to be recognized and used in studying the world. So, mathematics has a central place among the sciences, and it receives a special honor in the late modern world.
The increasing importance of mathematics and its profitable application in so many fields led many educators to turn their attention toward mathematics and away from the more traditional studies of language and logic; some even came to think, or at least sometimes to act as if, the study of language is opposed to a mathematical perspective. C. P. Snow detailed this conflict in his work on the two cultures of academic life, the scientific and the humanistic. But there is in principle no opposition between the study of discourse and the study of mathematics and natural science. Indeed, it is clear that they are complementary; and this is why both are always included in every effort to give students a general education.
Mathematics, then, is extremely powerful for understanding the world. But is mathematics more general or more expressive than language? It is not. We consider why next.