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Archetypes, Image Schemas, Numbers and the Season

Let’s ask again, “What is the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts? It’s a simple question to ask, but a fairly difficult one to answer.

Raphael Nunez contributed a chapter to the Springer book, Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science. A pdf of the chapter can be found here. […]

Real Fictions in Mathematics: Poincare and the Mathematical Continuum

Cantor once remarked that the essence of mathematics lies entirely in its freedom. And it is this about mathematics that consistently inspires me. But understanding how it finds that freedom, and the relevance or meaning of what it accomplishes with it, is a deep and complex question.

And so I would like to go back […]

Pauli, Jung, Matter and Symbol

In the first half of the twentieth century, physicists and mathematicians began to raise questions about what they could say about what they were actually doing. The ‘truth’ of things was beginning to elude the seekers of that truth. Both the validity of mathematical ideas and the objectivity of physics came under scrutiny. Questions about […]

Fibonacci Sequence

My attention was brought today to a very pretty short film visualizing displays of the Fibonacci Sequence in nature on YouTube. The sequence was introduced to western mathematics in 1202. Descriptions of the film’s displays can be found here. A more complete description of the mathematical properties and applications of the sequence can be found […]

A Disappearing Number

It isn’t often that the human experience of mathematics is explored in the arts, but it does happen. A Beautiful Mind and Proof are two recent examples of math-related dramas. But it seems that, by many accounts, A Disappearing Number has succeeded in weaving mathematics itself into the mystery of human lives. The play premiered […]

The Imaginary Part: Not By Logic But By Intuition

I decided to write today a little more directly about mathematics. A book I’m working on led me to review a story I like very much, the incubation and birthing of the complex number. The story has been told many times (Dantzig’s Number and Nahin’s An Imaginary Tale to name just two). But most of […]