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Journeying in and out

When ecently reminded of the images in Catholic texts and prayers, I considered, again, my hunch that mathematics could somehow help connect unrelated aspects our experience, in particular counterintuitive religious images and familiar sensory experience. I am not suggesting that mathematics would explain these images, but more that it could be used to encourage, perhaps […]

Number, insight, and the Riemann Hypothesis

The Riemann Hypothesis came to my attention again recently. More specifically I read a bit about the possibility that quantum mechanical measurements may provide a proof of a centuries-old hypothesis and one of mathematics’ most famous enigmas.

Within mathematics itself, without any reference to its physical meaning, the Riemann Hypothesis highlights the kind of […]

Shared paths to Infinity

My last post focused on the kinds of problems that can develop when abstract objects, created within mathematics, increase in complexity – like the difficulty of wrapping our heads around them, or of managing them without error. I thought it would be interesting to turn back around and take a look at how the seeds […]

Poe’s cosmology

A post from John Horgan with the title Did Edgar Allan Poe Foresee Modern Physics and Cosmology? quickly got my attention. Horgan writes in response to an essay by Marilynne Robinson in the February 5 New York Review of Books where Poe’s book-length prose poem Eureka was brought to his attention. Eureka was written by […]

What mathematics can make of our intuition

The CogSci 2014 Proceedings have been posted and there are a number of links to interesting papers.

Here are some math-related investigations:

A neural network model of learning mathematical equivalence The Psychophysics of Algebra Expertise: Mathematics Perceptual Learning Interventions Produce Durable Encoding Changes

Two Plus Three is Five: Discovering Efficient Addition Strategies without Metacognition

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Embodiment and a Philosophy of Mathematics

Yesterday I gave a talk at a symposium at the 36th annual Cognitive Science Conference. The content of the talk was described this way in our symposium proposal:

Mathematics has been the subject of experimental studies in cognitive science that explore the sensory grounding of number and magnitude. But mathematics also provides conceptual schemes that […]

The mathematics of common sense

I will be joining a few colleagues for a symposium at CogSci2014 and I’ve been gathering some notes for my talk. The talk will focus on the impact of embodiment theories on a philosophy of mathematics. As I looked again at some of the things I’ve chosen to highlight in my blogs, I came upon […]

Infinities, Tolstoy, dreams and Nabokov

My interest in mathematics is more personal than it is academic. I learned what I know formally, in the usual sequence of undergraduate and graduate math courses. But it has penetrated my personal life, and I have come to see mathematics as deeply rooted in a fundamental human drive to live more, or to live […]

The Irrationality of Mathematics?

When I write, I often choose my words very carefully in order to remove any opportunity the reader might have to make a quick judgment about the content of what I am saying. I’m hoping they will keep thinking about what I am saying. The unexpected pairing of words often accomplishes this, and in this […]

The solstice, archaeoastronomy and mathematics

Given the arrival of the summer solstice and this post on the EarthSky website, I decided to write a little bit about what prehistoric monuments (like Stonehenge) suggest to me about some of the roots of mathematics.

With a photograph to support the claim, the EarthSky post tells us:

If you stood inside the Stonehenge […]