Creativity: a scientific viewpoint

Last night I was lucky enough to be able to attend a wonderful two hour lecture and chat session with Margaret Boden OBE, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in my old home town of Brighton. She is here visiting the University of Canterbury as a Distinguished Erskine Fellow, and gave [...]

The meaning of scientific literacy

The promotion of scientific and mathematical literacy is always to be applauded. Looking at the world honestly, and drawing conclusions based on the evidence, are two important skills for making a human whole. Alone, they lead to a lifeless vision of terrifying sterility, but combined with compassion, creativity, imagination, and love, they have the power [...]

The long view of our night view

Scientific American have surpassed themselves again with a beautiful slideshow taking the long view of how the night sky seen from Earth has changed in the past and will change in the future. The images themselves are striking as works of art, but what really hits home is the brevity of recorded human history in [...]

Narrative in teaching mathematics

Bob has yet another fascinating post over at Heroes Not Zombies, this time explaining how writing about their experience of the disease helped cancer patients to change their thinking of the illness.

In the face of suffering and death, mathematics seems very trivial. But I have noticed that many of the best moments in a lecture [...]

Scientific Fundamentalism

The September 2007 edition of Physics World, the in-house magazine of the Institute of Physics, featured an article by Joanne Brunker entitled “Physglish: our coded speech”. This was one of a series of short essays under the heading “Lateral Thoughts”, essays supposed to be a bit fun and to provoke some thinking in the [...]

An aegrotat from all exams?

David Corfield recently solved a little problem I posted on this blog. His name had come a few times to my notice recently, for his research work, his posts on the n-Category Café, and his book Why do People Get Ill? In a peculiar twist, when I went to our library to borrow his Towards [...]

On the value of boredom

I’m just skimming through my Head of Department’s copy of The Problems of Mathematics* by Ian Stewart on a beautiful sunny day of the Southern Hemisphere spring. It’s a Friday, and I have a lot of work to do, but frankly I’m a little bored with all of it at the moment. Perhaps this is [...]

The creative discovery process in mathematics

Mathematicians appreciate the necessity of a long period of unconscious rumination of a problem for the eventual sudden appearance of the solution. Sometimes you can sit down with a problem and a piece of paper, and see the way forward almost immediately. But more often several days, weeks, months, years, or even generations of thinking, [...]

Richard Branson on Education

The supernaturally rich Richard Branson, starting from nought and now running companies worth over $25 billion, gives a fascinating interview which you can watch at TED. Fascinatingly, this creative, generous, productive, socially-aware, philanthropic, witty, charming, loving man says he did very poorly in academic work at school, that he would have “failed IQ tests”. This [...]

Scientific humility

Bloggers and other writing or talking heads of science can be somewhat strident in their insistence of the universal applicability of the scientific method. Those of us responsible for standing in front of classes and teaching them what we have learned would also do well to recall a line from Thoreau’s Walden:
How can he remember [...]