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Avalanches, structure, and expectations

New Scientist did an article in their February 6 issue called Mind Maths: Five laws that rule the brain.

As is usually the case, the article’s allure is the suggestion that new research may hold the promise of capturing the brain’s complexity in just a few mathematical models. And, as is usually the case, […]

Chaitin, creativity, biology and mathematics

I was looking today, once again, at Gregory Chaitin’s most recent work which is described in his book Proving Darwin. I realized that much of what has been written about this work (even what I have written) doesn’t give adequate attention to the crucial shifts in perspective that metabiology proposes. Chaitin says concisely:

According to […]

Sensual Mathematics

I’m not sure why I hadn’t been aware of it before today, but documentary film maker Ekaterina Eremenko has made the film Colors of Math. (Its Russian title is Sensual Mathematics)

I was happy to see that the work was supported and partly funded by my alma mater, The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at […]

Life’s music, movement, language and mathematics

Things happen in nature. Cells socialize and build structure, organisms grow, and move, and interact, and then more things grow – like music, language, and mathematics. Generally, talk about evolution is very pragmatic. Cell organization, the shaping of roots, leaves, nourishment mechanisms, reproductive drives, are all usually understood as fairly specific purposeful processes. Perhaps by […]

Ant arithmetic and prairie dog conversation

One of the points I wanted to make in last week’s post was that studies in animal cognition suggest the presence of mathematics in the behavior of non-human species – the ants, for example, who can be seen to pass on quantitative information to other ants. We don’t see the mathematics they may be doing […]

Riemann, angelfish and ants

I have recently spent some time sorting out the points Arkady Plotnitsky makes about the significance of Riemann’s notion of manifold (or manifoldness) in his paper which appeared in the journal Configurations in 2009. The paper has the title Bernhard Riemann’s Conceptual Mathematics, and the Idea of Space. It is refreshing in that it considers […]

Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, and mathematics

I listened last week to Diane Rehm’s interview with Ray Kurzweil, author of the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed” A transcript of the interview can be found here.

Published in mid-November, it is already a New York Times bestseller, and some of the responses to it from prominent […]

Embodied and dis-embodied meaning

I found a short paper today by Mark Andrews, Stefan Frank and Gabriella Vigliocco focused on reconciling two trends in the study of meaning in cognitive science. These two trends are represented by embodied cognition theories (which treat meaning as a simulation of perceptual and motor states) and by computational or distributional accounts of meaning […]

Mathematical life forms and really big numbers

I finally got hold of a copy of Gergory Chaitin’s latest book, Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical. The thesis of the book is very appealing to me, since it equates mathematical creativity with biological creativity. And, I would say that Chaitin’s work is a captivating experiment. He is, as he says, “attempting to find the […]

Order, computation and creativity in biology

Current research into the neuroscience of our visual system tells us that what we see is constructed through the coordinated effect of cells sensitive to particular aspects of a visual scene. Attributes such as motion, form and color are processed in individually specialized areas, along paths that lead to the primary visual cortex, creating what […]