A scientist, astronomer, and mathematician, Galileo was one of the great minds of the Renaissance.  He also has a complicated history with the church that arose out of his defense of Copernican heliocentrism—the view that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe.

But for all the drama of that disagreement, Galileo, like almost all mathematicians and scientists until very recent times, recognized that the observable, mathematical order in the universe was there because it had been “written” there by the author of nature.

Things we take for granted every day are natural evidences of this authorship: symmetry—in human faces, in the leaves of trees; the number Pi—3.14, most often used to calculate the circumference of any circle, also shows up in surprising places in nature, like ocean and sound waves; the Fibonacci sequence—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on, always adding the previous 2 numbers to get the next, shows up in the spirals of a pine cone, in the seeds of a sunflower, and in the spiral of seashells, hurricanes, and even the orbits of our galaxy.

Math is not just a bunch of number symbols that you have to grind your way through to get a decent grade.  It is a reflection of the mind of God, beautifully written into nature, for His glory and our enjoyment.

Have a wonderful day.