Mathematics As More Than Just A Human Cultural Activity — Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: xix):

To mathematicians (at least to most of them, as far as I can make out), mathematics is not just a cultural activity that we have ourselves created, but it has a life of its own, and much of it finds an amazing harmony with the physical universe. We cannot get any deep understanding of the laws that govern the physical world without entering the world of mathematics.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, mathematics — reasoning with quantities — is a trans-cultural semiotic system that is realised by a highly designed and restricted register of language, with its own specialised graphological system. As such, it is the creation of language users, and depends on language users for its continued existence.

The 'amazing harmony' of much of mathematics with the physical universe is the relation of construals of first-order material-order phenomena (the physical universe) to their reconstruals as semiotic-order phenomena (mathematical physics).

As previously explained, there are no laws that govern the physical world, just as there are no maps that govern the territory they map.