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 […]
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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 […] NPR recently hosted an interview with Dean Buonomano, neuroscientist and author of the book Brain Bugs: How The Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives. I usually like evolutionary perspectives, and enjoy thoughts on how our experience, however abstract and complex it may seem, is somehow built on the biological stuff of our world. But the best […] A recent Scientific American article on the physical limits of intelligence raised more questions for me than it answered with its intriguing analysis of neural mechanisms. The point of the article is to consider that it may be physically impossible for humanity to become more ‘intelligent’ with further evolution. I think we would all agree, […] I happened upon an article in Plus about the vector analysis that ants seem to be using to find their way home. Studies exploring insect navigation tools are relevant, not only to building robot navigation tools, but also to understanding the extent to which cognitive structures exist in other living things (and, perhaps, how they […] 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 […] |
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