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 […]
|
|||||
|
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, […] In a recent post, I referred to a study at MIT that suggested that infants reason by mentally simulating possible scenarios in a given configuration (like different colored objects bouncing around in a container). They then figure out which outcome is most likely based on just a few physical principles (like whether the object nearest […] 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 […] I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics and author of the book The Lightness of Being. During the Q and A after the talk he was asked if our aesthetic judgment of symmetry could be said to prejudice scientific inquiry. Wilczek first pointed to the rich […] I would like to go back today to Riemann, and the significance of his generalized notions of space and magnitude, but with an eye on what neuroscience may be adding to how mathematics gains its effectiveness. In a recent post, I pointed to the influence the philosopher Herbart had on Riemann’s 1854 lecture in which […] Mathematics today can seem an isolated discipline, removed from the questions of life and questions of meaning. But even a brief look at some of the writing of individuals like Leibniz, Weyl, and Poincare demonstrates substantial interest on the part of the mathematician to reconcile mathematics with common human experience. I remember one of my […] |
|
||||
|
Copyright © 2024 Mathematics Rising - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||||
Recent Comments