Mathematics Rising

My time this week is again taken up with work on a few writing projects that I’m trying to wrap up (not to mention end of the term grading).  But I should be back on track with my regular blogs next week. In the meantime, an article on scientificamerican.com caught my attention, being about the [...]

I’m short on time today and working on a guest blog which I hope to be able to provide a link to shortly.  But I did begin exploring a website that has short video interviews with some of my favorite thinkers.  I found among a list of participants on the website Closer To Truth, Gregory [...]

I was expecting to write about a paper I found recently by Oran Magal, a post doc at McGill University, On the mathematical nature of logic. I was attracted to the paper because the title was followed by the phrase Featuring P. Bernays and K. Gödel I’m often intrigued by disputes over whether mathematics can [...]

I’d like today to stay on the topic of mathematics from the cognitive science perspective, and in particular, to make available another set of interesting studies summarized by C. R. Gallistel, Rochel Gelman and Sara Cordes. The studies are described in their contribution to the book Evolution and Culture (edited by Stephen C. Levinson and [...]

I am increasingly fascinated by the mathematics of fundamental cognitive processes – like creatures finding their way to and from significant locations, or foraging for food, or foraging with the eyes, or comprehending the duration of an event. I’m excited by the fact that there are cognitive neuroscientists that have become focused on the architecture [...]

A recent blog from Jennifer Ouellette (from the Scientific American Blog Network)  brought my attention once again to how mathematics is related to the structure-building functions of the brain. As I followed up on some of the references in her post, I found myself on a little journey through hallucinatory experiences that I really enjoyed. [...]

I saw an opinion piece by Stephen Ornes, in the March 16 issue of New Scientist which ties the ongoing debate about the nature of mathematical ideas, to a modern one about money and ownership.  Ornes argues that patentability is one of the most hotly contested issues in software development.  The problem, as many see [...]

A nice article, focused on the origins of creativity, appears in the March 13 issue of Scientific American. Author, Heather Pringle, surveys research that seems to indicate that the human talent for innovation actually emerged over hundreds of thousands of years ago, before homo sapiens left Africa.  This is contrary to the view held previously [...]

I read another New Scientist article today. The article was written by Brian Greene. While it didn’t give me a lot of new information, it made an interesting point about what it means (and when is it particularly effective) to take our mathematics seriously.  He talked about Einstein’s insight regarding the speed of light.  It [...]

New Scientist did an article in their February 6 issue called Mind Maths: Five laws that rule the brain.   As is usually the case, the article’s allure is the suggestion that new research may hold the promise of capturing the brain’s complexity in just a few mathematical models.  And, as is usually the case, I [...]