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Where does mathematics live?

A Scientific American article brought mathematical knitting to my attention once again, and within the article was a link to Bridges, an organization which oversees the annual Bridges conference that explores the connections between art and mathematics. Following the link to their 2013 Conference, I found their Short Movie Festival. I’ve watched a number of […]

What the experience of mathematical beauty could imply

Back in September, 1992 Semir Zeki wrote an article for what was then a special issue of Scientific American called Mind and Brain. In it he described what was known about how the brain produces visual images. I have referred back to the article many times because it highlights the philosophical implications of our current […]

What does our experience have to do with mathematics?

This is something of a follow-up to my last post. I checked out a series of links related to Max Tegmark in the last few days, having heard about the release of his first book Our Mathematical Universe. But I was also motivated by having observed that the latest conference organized by the Foundational Questions […]

Wasps, bees, faces and mathematics

An article in the December issue of Scientific American gave me a new insect behavior to ponder and one that might reveal, in the insect’s biology, a distant cousin to the mathematical idea we call mapping. It seems that there are insects that have a talent for recognizing faces. Their talent has much in common […]

Thinking as a churning, swarming activity

The Atlantic Monthly just did an interesting piece on Douglas Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Bach and Escher. Hofstadter’s 1979 book investigates the nature of human thought processes by looking at common themes in the work of the mathematician Gödel, the musician Bach and the artist Escher. In particular, it addresses the question of […]

Numerosity, vision, language and mathematics

Understanding the neural functions that contribute to the birth of mathematical structure and meaning is an active subject of research in cognitive science. A significant amount of work has been done to identify an innate ability we share with other creatures, namely the ability to perceive quantity. This is sometimes called our approximate number sense. […]

More on category theory and the brain

I’ve referred to category theory on more than one occasion (particularly with respect to physicist Bob Coecke’s graphical language). Not too long ago, Ronald Brown, at Bangor University, brought my attention to the work that he and colleagues have been doing to investigate the kind of mathematics that could be used to model the complexity […]

My article in +Plus Magazine

My piece on Riemann and cognition was published this week in +Plus. Here’s the link.

Finding ourselves between physics and biology

The Institute of Physics (IOP) Biological Physics Group has a conference coming up June 24 to June 26 in Brighton, UK. The title of the conference is what first got my attention: Physics of Emergent Behavior/From single cells to groups of individuals.

The following text appears on the conference home page to introduce their interest […]

Pigeons, rats, monkeys and real numbers

I’d like today to stay on the topic of mathematics from the cognitive science perspective, and in particular, to make available another set of interesting studies summarized by C. R. Gallistel, Rochel Gelman and Sara Cordes. The studies are described in their contribution to the book Evolution and Culture (edited by Stephen C. Levinson and […]