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Architecture, orientation and mathematics

Recently, I became intrigued with the discussions of topology that I found among architects and historians of architecture. I saw a few familiar threads running through these discussions – like the emergence and self-organizing principles of biology, together with the view that mathematics was not, primarily, a tool but more a point of view.

I […]

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 […]

Beauty, Passion and Computation

I listened to a couple of interviews with Gregory Chaitin on the Closer to Truth website. They may have been part of TV episodes that I haven’t seen but I was actually invigorated by some of the things he said, and it made me want to share them.

One of the interviews (in two parts) […]

Things versus Relations and Objects versus Properties

In the August issue of Scientific American, Meinard Kuhlmann addresses, yet again, the conceptual difficulties inherent in the interpretations of experimental data of modern physics.

…the particle interpretation of quantum physics, as well as the field interpretation, stretches our conventional notions of “particle” and “field” to such an extent that ever more people think the […]

My article in +Plus Magazine

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

Structure, structure and more structure

I was expecting to write about a paper I found recently by Oran Magal, a post doc at McGill University, On the mathematical nature of logic. I was attracted to the paper because the title was followed by the phrase Featuring P. Bernays and K. Gödel

I’m often intrigued […]

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 […]

Wigner, Persig, Leibniz and the nature of reality

I saw an opinion piece by Stephen Ornes, in the March 16 issue of New Scientist which ties the ongoing debate about the nature of mathematical ideas, to a modern one about money and ownership. Ornes argues that patentability is one of the most hotly contested issues in software development. The problem, as many see […]

Are we finding the mathematical structure of reality?

I’m intrigued by Max Tegmark’s conviction that the universe is, itself, a mathematical structure. He presented his ideas, again, on February 15 at the recent annual meeting of AAAS, in a symposium called Is Beauty Truth? He said that he has just completed a book on the same topic. I listened to the entire session […]