Categories

String theories, illusions, and mathematics

Back in July, David Castelvechhi blogged about a conversation between John Horgan and George Musser. I missed it when it was new, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it completely. Most of their discussion focuses on the value or viability of what has come to be known as string theory. It was a thoughtful debate […]

Loops, pain and Gödel

A recent Radiolab episode brought some interesting things together by exploring loops, repetitions, and self-referencing phenomena.

Among other things, they told the story of Melanie Thernstrom (The Pain Chronicles) who, in trying to manage her pain, investigated the self-inflicted pain of religious rites. She later did some work with neuroscientist Sean Mackey. Mackey had seen […]

Archimedes, particle accelerators and being visual

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 […]

Time, memory, illusions and mathematics

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 […]

Packed oranges, bridges and misunderstandings

David Castelvecchi, at the Scientific American blog network, wrote about a Comment article that appeared in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature. The author, Peter Rowlett, takes note of what could happen when the mathematician “pushes ideas far into the abstract, well beyond where others would stop.” He does this with a collection […]

Grid cells and time cells in rats, continuity, and the monkey’s mind

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. […]

Number Sense: What we can’t do? or What we can see

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 […]

Slow Hunches and Our Spotty Awareness

I recently listened to a radiolab podcast (from this past November!) that featured two authors: Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants). The thrust of the argument, that both authors defended, was that the things we make (from tools to gadgets to computers) are an […]

Arithmetic, Generalization and Order: Harnessing Infinity

Today, I was working on a piece I’m writing about 19th century developments in mathematics and I saw something interesting. In the piece, I draw particular attention to a few things. One of these is the precision Weierstrass brought to the concept of a limit, removing all references to motion or geometry, and giving it […]

Optical Realities: Mathematics and Visual Processes

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 […]