I feel like I was pulled into a little whirlpool of interesting bits of info this morning. I was attracted to the title of David Castelvecchi’s blog: Archimedes and Euclid? Like String Theory versus Freshman Calculus. The blog reports the opening of an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, showcasing one of three […]
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In a recent post on the Scientific American blog network, George Musser reported on talks given by neuroscientists at a conference, organized by the Foundational Questions Institute on how the brain works to construct our sense of past, present and future. Musser’s post made some observations that were familiar to me – like the idea […] I was reading up on some nineteenth century philosophy and science for a book project of mine and I found an essay by Timothy Lenoir called The Eye as Mathematician. It is a discussion of the construction of Helmholtz’s theory of vision. The title suggests that the eye is acting like a mathematician. My disposition […] I found myself tied a bit to the theme of last week’s blog when my attention was brought to a very recent article in PLoS Biology called Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. In it a team of biologists, psychologists and philosophers from the Netherlands, the United States and Scotland, suggest that the […] My last post caused me to survey some things related to Bayesian statistics as they relate to mathematics and cognition. First, I want to say that despite the fact that I have been looking more closely at 19th century developments in mathematics, I didn’t know until today that Laplace, in 1814, described a system of […] It happens many times in class that I say, “in mathematics when you see something you don’t know, you try to figure it out using something you do know. And, recently, in the context of thinking about the generalizations that blossomed in late 19th and early 20th century mathematics, I’ve also wondered how it is […] I’m a little pressed for time this week so I thought I would try to provide some fun links. Steven Strogatz, mathematician and writer, speaks on a radiolab broadcast about an early insight. It was in a high school math class where he says he was being taught how to use graph paper. The teacher […] I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics and author of the book The Lightness of Being. During the Q and A after the talk he was asked if our aesthetic judgment of symmetry could be said to prejudice scientific inquiry. Wilczek first pointed to the rich […] I don’t think it’s actually possible to answer the question in the title of this post, but I still believe it’s worth asking. We’ve thought of things ‘hidden under a microscope,’ or obscured by great distances, but in mathematics when something is hidden, it’s because we haven’t been able to imagine it yet. And when […] Mathematics today can seem an isolated discipline, removed from the questions of life and questions of meaning. But even a brief look at some of the writing of individuals like Leibniz, Weyl, and Poincare demonstrates substantial interest on the part of the mathematician to reconcile mathematics with common human experience. I remember one of my […] |
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