Mathematics Rising

I followed a lead today that came at the end of Clifford Pickover’s The Math Book. The last of Pickover’s 250 milestones in mathematics is Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which Tegmark published in 2007 in both scientific and  popular articles.  The hypothesis is that “our universe is not just described by mathematics – it [...]

Some of George Berkeley’s fame comes from his vehement critique of Newton’s calculus.  His criticism was harsh and inspired a number of responses from contemporaries who accepted the vanishing quantities Newton used to formulate his notion of fluxions or, in modern terms, his understanding of instantaneous rates of change.  The discussion that followed Berkeley’s 1734 [...]

Let’s ask again, “What is the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts?  It’s a simple question to ask, but a fairly difficult one to answer. Raphael Nunez contributed a chapter to the Springer book, Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science.  A pdf of the chapter can be found here.  [...]

I’ve become a bit preoccupied recently with the world of early 20th century mathematicians, partly because of a book I’m working on, but also because of how late 19th and early 20th century thinking largely defines the mathematics students learn today.  In this light I found a book of selected writings of Hermann Weyl, a [...]

I just read through a series of blogs generated by an article in the journal Neurosurgery, in which two neurosurgery researchers at Johns Hopkins University argue that an anatomically accurate image of the human brain is hidden in God’s neck in one of Michelangelo’s frescos.  I was struck by how little the reports and blogs [...]

This may not be a timely commentary, but I only recently read the book Naming Infinity (Harvard University Press 2009). It was a gift from my husband who rightly expected that I would be interested in a book purported to be about how mathematicians were supported through a conceptual crisis by the bold work of [...]