Mathematics Rising

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 [...]

I have recently spent some time sorting out the points Arkady Plotnitsky makes about the significance of Riemann’s notion of manifold (or manifoldness) in his paper which appeared in the journal Configurations in 2009.  The paper has the title Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics, and the Idea of Space.  It is refreshing in that it considers [...]

I’ve been working on an article that has me thinking about neuroscientifc studies on the cerebral representations of magnitude and it happened to be brought to my attention today that Irene Pepperberg spoke at the 2012 Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Animals. Pepperberg is famous for having worked for many years with an [...]

I have often said that I get particular pleasure from mathematics that defies common sense expectations.  A simple example would be the observation that two things can be the same size even though one of them is contained in the other – like the set of natural numbers and the set of positive even integers.   [...]

A number of websites have reported on a recent study, that correlated innate number sense with mathematical ability.  A concise report of the study can be found in the Johns Hopkins University Gazette, published by the institution where the study was done.  The study’s results confirm a correlation between the strength of ones number sense [...]