Mathematics Rising

As a brief follow-up to my last post, I reread some pages in Tobias Dantzig’s book Number and, on one of them, he is critical of early 20th century formalists when he says about symbols in mathematics: To me the tremendous importance of this symbolism lies not in these sterile attempts to banish intuition from [...]

I often get stuck in the gap we rarely notice between the word and what the word is meant to signify.   Do we really understand what word and symbol actually do?  Or, even more to the point, can we see what the body is accomplishing in the evolution of these cognitive tools? In a film [...]

Most of us begin drawings with lines.  And even though those lines may not be in the subject of a rendering, they are nonetheless perceived.  Some of the visual information we use to re-present our experience in a drawing is also used in mathematics, geometry in particular.  A difficult question to answer  but an interesting [...]

The story of online gamers solving protein structure problems for biochemists has been reported by many, including the New York Times, NPR’s 360, Youtube, and a host of blogs.  The gamers, by using their three-dimensional puzzle solving skills, have made significant contributions to biochemical research. The problem for biochemists is predicting the shape that a [...]

I just heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that centered on when we became mentally modern human beings.  In our evolutionary history, the show argues, the appearance of symbolic thought marks the genesis of uniquely human developments more than say, standing upright.  And I agree.  On a daily basis, we move more from [...]

My introduction to Semir Zeki came in 1992 with a special issue of Scientific American called Mind And Brain. I still have the magazine with the lines I highlighted. I was excited when I read it. Something new was happening. Here are some of the passages I marked: “The past two decades have brought neurologists [...]